I fail to see the problem with importing 300,000 metric tons of lean beef over a 90 day period and then selling it to meat packers at a 25% discount to use in producing ground beef by mixing it with fat scrapping a from domestic cattle

Some are saying this is undermining Cattle Ranchers. I am not an expert but after doing a bit of research this seems not the case.

Here is what I learned (Grok and ChatGBT assisted)

The beef production system is more complex than the Rancher to Meat Packer Narrative we are fed. The Rancher typically sells their cattle off to Feed Lots who fatten them up quickly before selling to meat packers

The Beef industry as a whole has very low levels of true vertical integration . Ranchers are very fragmented and packer-owned/fed cattle is only 5-10%, though high concentration in packing and substantial vertical coordination via contracts with feed lots and larger cattle producers is present.

There are some exceptions

• Sustainable Beef, a Nebraska-based meatpacking plant built by a coalition of cattle ranchers, launched in May 2025. This $400 million facility can process 1,500 head of cattle per day and sends much of its output directly to Walmart—which holds a minority stake. Ranchers here are trying to reclaim power over how their cattle are processed and to whom they’re sold. For comparison, this volume of processing is similar to processors such as DemKota, and One World Beef in California (also privately owned by a family with roots in cattle ranching).

https://www.meatchris.com/blog/2025/9/4/vertical-integration-in-the-beef-business-running-the-whole-enchilada-from-pasture-to-plate

For context total cattle slaughter around 100,000–120,000+ on a typical weekday and $400 million is required to handle less than 1.5% of that.

“Tyson Foods, one of the largest meatpacking companies in the US, has implemented a vertically integrated business model that includes cattle production, feeding, processing, and distribution. This has enabled the company to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase profitability. Tyson Foods has also invested heavily in technology and infrastructure, including the use of advanced cattle breeding and genetics, and automated processing and packaging systems.”

Overview

Relationship-Approximate share of fed cattle

Packer actually owns cattle/feedlot~5% or less

Packer controls cattle through contracts/marketing agreements ~30–40%

Some form of packer-controlled/captive supply~35–50%

Independent cattle ownership and cash/negotiated sales ~50–65%

In short, while the packing sector is highly concentrated and most fed cattle move under contractual arrangements (vertical coordination), the overall beef industry—especially production stages—is not predominantly vertically integrated by ownership. Independent producers still dominate upstream

On the whole cattle producers or ranchers are highly fragmented and shrinking in numbers, some of which is due to consolidation although nowhere near that of Meat Packers or even Feedlots. The number of operations with at least one beef cow totaled 622,162, down 106,884 operations (-15%) from the 2017 Census.

The decline in beef operations coincided with a steep decline in America’s beef cow herd. The 2022 Census counted 29.214 million beef cows, down 2.5 million cows (-8%) from 2017’s 31.722 million. The number of beef cows has declined further since 2022. As of January 1, 2026, there are 27.6 million beef cows in the United States, which is a 1% decrease from the previous year

Seventy-nine percent of producers own fewer than 50 beef cows and represent just 25% of the herd. Include all producers with fewer than 100 cows and the results are stunning – 89.5% of beef cow owners represent just 39.5% of the nation’s herd, with an average herd size of 20 cows.

That means 60.5% of America’s beef cows are in herds of 100 head or more (58,115 ranches), average size 195 cows. And the 6,972 ranches with 500 or more have 6.3 million cows, 22% of the total, and an average herd size of 905

https://www.drovers.com/news/education/fewer-cows-fewer-ranchers

The traditional production sequence is Cow-calf rancher → Stocker/backgrounder rancher → Feedlot → Meat packer → Processor/distributor → Retailer

Cow-calf rancher

• Cow-calf rancher . Calves are usually weaned at 6–10 months of age, weighing roughly 400–600 pounds and then sold off to stocker/ backgrounder who continue to grow them

• A stocker/backgrounder buys the weaned calves from cow-calf ranchers and grow them for several months. They add ~200–400+ lb and then sell them to a feedlot

• Feedlot: Raises/fattens cattle to market weight, typically bringing them to roughly 1,200–1,500+ lb. The feedlot’s job is essentially to produce a finished animal ready for slaughter.

• Meat packer: Buys or contracts with feedlots for fed cattle, transports them to a slaughter facility, kills and dresses the carcass, and then typically breaks the carcass into wholesale cuts.

• Further processor: May take boxed beef or trim and make ground beef, steaks, sausages, etc.

The major packers in the U.S. include JBS USA, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef Packing Company.

Feedlots control the supply of finished cattle. Packers control the slaughter capacity.

A feedlot can have cattle ready to slaughter, but if packers don’t have enough shackle space/slaughter capacity, cattle can remain on feed longer. That increases their weight and feeding costs and can affect both:

1. cattle prices paid to feedlots, and

2. the amount and timing of beef reaching the wholesale/retail market.

Fed Steers and fed heifers are generally slaughtered relatively young. They produce the carcasses from which we get most of the familiar higher-value cuts

• Ribeye

• Prime rib

• Strip steak

• Tenderloin/filet

• T-bone/porterhouse

• Sirloin

• Chuck roast

• Rib roast

• Round roasts

A mature beef cow may have spent years producing calves and therefore tends to be older and have less desirable carcass characteristics. Consequently, much of its meat goes into:

• Ground beef

• Sausage

• Processed beef

• Lean-beef products used to blend with fattier beef

So basically fed Steers and fed heifers provide us premium steaks/roasts + ground beef while other Beef cows , dairy cows and bulls provide lean/processing beef which when mixed with excess fat from Steers and fed heifers produce ground beef

Cow-calf phase (on the ranch)

Calves nurse on their mother’s milk while grazing alongside the cow. The main feed is pasture or rangeland forage (native or improved grasses, legumes, etc.).

In winter or when pasture is limited, ranchers commonly feed hay, silage, or crop residues (such as corn stalks), sometimes with mineral supplements.

Calves are usually weaned at 6–10 months of age, weighing roughly 400–600 pounds and then sold off to stocker/ backgrounder who continue to grow them

A cow-calf rancher maintains the breeding herd

Stocker or backgrounding phase

A stocker/backgrounder buys the weaned calves from cow-calf ranchers and grow them for several months. They add ~200–400+ lb and then sell them to a feedlot

A stocker is basically “a rancher who doesn’t bother with the cow-and-calf part.” Some of the Ranchers do both.

In this stage the diet remains predominantly forage-based with Grazing on pasture, winter wheat, or other harvested forages such as hay or silage.

Most of the land cattle graze on is privately owned, although ranchers and feedlots also rent from private landowner’s but a substantial portion—especially in the Western United States—is public land leased by ranchers. The largest ranchers lease the most land

Private individuals, families, and entities own more than half of U.S. rangelands and the bulk of actual grazing acreage nationally (one recent analysis estimated private land at roughly 55% of total grazing land in the contiguous U.S.).

Ranchers typically own or control the “base” property (deeded private land) where their cattle graze for part or all of the year. This includes pastures, improved grasslands, and native rangeland. Many smaller and mid-sized operations rely primarily or entirely on their own land. Larger Western ranches often combine private ownership with public leases.

Federal, state, and tribal governments own large areas used for grazing. Federal lands are primarily managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM, roughly 155 million acres available for grazing) and the U.S. Forest Service (roughly 93 million acres). These are concentrated in the 11 contiguous Western states. Ranchers obtain grazing permits or leases (allotments) that allow them to run cattle for specified periods and numbers (measured in Animal Unit Months, or AUMs). Fees are low relative to private lease rates.

Public lands support a meaningful share of Western cattle production. Estimates indicate that ranches using federal grazing account for a large portion (around 50–60% in some analyses) of beef cows in the 11 Western states, though federal forage represents a much smaller percentage of total U.S. cattle feed nationally (generally a few percent of overall forage needs).

The goal is economical frame and muscle growth using lower-cost roughages. Cattle typically leave this phase weighing 650–900 pounds and are then ready for the feedlot.

This is usually where the typical Rancher cashes out

Feedlot phase

There are 82 mega-feedlots (50,000+ head capacity) marketing about 35% of all fed cattle sent to slaughter as of 2026, up from 20% in 1997. There are 26,000 feedlots in total. Feedlots buy the cattle from the rancher or the contract with the rancher who retains ownership until they are sold off or contracted out to Meat Packers

Once cattle enter a feedlot (the finishing phase), the diet shifts dramatically to high-energy concentrate rations dominated by grains (mainly corn), with smaller amounts of roughage, protein supplements, and additives. This produces the marbling and fat cover desired for higher-quality beef grades.

Meat Packers

Once the cattle are fat enough, in excess of 1,400 lbs they go to the Meat Packers who slaughter the cattle, butcher and pack it up and sell to retailers like Supermarkets or to Restaurant Chains.

Today, just four corporations—Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—control 80-85% of the U.S. beef market. This gives them extraordinary control over prices paid to feedlots and also prices charged to Supermarkets, food processors and Restaurant Chains

But the mega-Feedlots also have significant clout although they are nowhere as consolidated as the Meat Packers

And of course since COVID both Supermarkets and Restaurant Chains have less competition due to smaller outfits closures or mergers with bigger chains so they also contribute to higher prices at retail.

Ground Beef

Ground beef is often a blend of relatively fatty domestic beef with a much leaner source of beef. The major sources are

Cattle-Typical role in ground beef

Beef breeding cows

Major source of lean beef when culled from the herd. Their carcasses are often used heavily for ground beef and other processed beef.

Dairy cows

Major source of lean beef when culled. Dairy breeds tend to produce leaner carcasses and are an important source of manufacturing beef.

Fed steers

Major source, particularly of fatty trimmings generated when steaks/roasts are fabricated. Those trimmings are blended into ground beef.

Fed heifers

Same general role as steers; they provide steaks/roasts plus substantial trimmings used for ground beef.

To produce ground beef meat packers slaughter beef & dairy cows to get relatively lean manufacturing beef, and fed steers & heifers to get relatively fatty trimmings. These trimmings from fed steers and heifers tend to be relatively fatty—roughly 50% lean. They’re useful for making ground beef, but they need to be blended with leaner material to reach something like 80/20 or 90/10 ground beef.

Those materials are blended to produce different ground-beef formulations, such as 70/30, 80/20, 85/15, and 90/10.

When the cattle herd contracts, more cows are slaughtered, producing more lean trimmings. Those lean trimmings can then be blended with the fattier trimmings from grain-fed steers and heifers.

If the cattle herd is to expand, fewer breeding cows get slaughtered, reducing supply and increasing prices. This is whats happening now.

We also import more lean beef trimmings when the U.S. cattle industry does not produce enough lean beef. So imported lean beef trimmings are essentially a complement to U.S. production and is not necessarily competing with US beef.

This also explains why ground beef prices jumped when Trump added tariffs on imported beef last year, which includes lean beef trimmings, which no doubt had a knock on effect on steaks and roasts to maintain a sufficient price spread between premium cuts and ground beef

The tariffs hit the fast-food industry hardest: McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and other chains depend on imported lean trim to make affordable hamburgers. Its likely Trump will sell the imported lean beef at 25 % market prices to their beef processors. Much of the ground beef in supermarkets are made using domestic lean beef, perhaps blended with imported lean beef while most of the chains use mostly imported lean beef which is still cheaper despite the tariffs

So the question is do these hamburger chains drop prices to increase business or just pad their profits, and will the move drop prices at the retail level? I don’t know the answer to fhe first and the latter depends on who the government sells the beef to.

Also, the quantity being imported is only about 4% of annual consumption so it doesn’t seem likely that 300,000 metric tons sold at 25% less than market price to meat packers will do all that much.

So US export premium cuts (ribeye, tenderloin) while we import the lean beef and other cuts which are made more expensive with 36% tariffs.

Now the real question we all have is why is US made beef so expensive now, especially why has the price increased so rapidly over the past 1-2 years. Its clearly not just tariffs although they have an impact, and while herd size has declined advanced breeding and feeding technologies have allowed farmers to do more with less, producing more beef at a lower cost per calf, reducing the need for a large herd size

The farmer’s (more precisely, the rancher/feeder farmer) share of the Choice retail beef dollar has risen substantially since 2021, and the primary driver is that cattle/net farm values have risen faster than retail beef values. One reason is that feed and other operating costs have risen less than beef prices, the other is the big meat packers have been accused of collusion and no doubt have been more generous with prices paid to feed lots and in turn feed lots pay more to the Rancher

The DOJ and USDA had been actively investigating the “Big Four” (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, National Beef) for price manipulation since 2020. In 2024, JBS paid $55 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over beef price-fixing (though they admitted no wrongdoing). No doubt Trump has relaxed collusion investigations and beef prices have exploded in the past 18 months. Coincidence?

In 2021 the rancher/feedlot farmer got 36.8% (2021 annual average ) of the retail value while the 2025 annual average was ~53.5%. Recent monthly/quarterly readings have frequently been in the 51–56% range, so lets use 53%

The percentage increase since 2021 is 44%, almost double the actual reported inflation rate of 23%. The retail value of choice beef today has increased 45%. Ground beef has increased 59%

Despite the high process overall per-capita beef consumption has remained stable in the high 50 lbs although consumers have been consuming more ground beef, going from 45% of beef consumption in 2020 to 50% or more today

Imported lean beef trimmings make up 38.7% of all beef trimmings used in ground beef today, up from 25% average over the last 20 years up to 2020

U.S. cow slaughter declined sharply (down about 28.7% from 2022 through 2025), reducing domestic lean trim supplies while fed cattle continued to produce substantial fatty trimmings necessitating the need to import more lean beef to keep ground beef production sufficient to meet demand

The sharp drop in U.S. cow slaughter, particularly breeding cows) which is a main source in domestic lean beef from the elevated levels of 2022 into 2023–2025 mainly reflects the shift from drought-driven herd liquidation to the early stages of herd retention and rebuilding

So contrary to the belief that imported lean beef hurt ranchers it makes their fatty beef more valuable as otherwise the excess fat would not have as much value.

Cattle/calf prices and receipts have risen sharply. USDA cash receipts for cattle and calves climbed from roughly $73 billion in 2021 to about $128 billion in 2025 (and continued high into 2026). That’s a large nominal increase even as the national herd shrank. So while the retail price rose 45% the ranchers/farmers received 75% more in total revenue despite selling fewer cattle

Cow-calf profitability has reached historic highs. Industry surveys (e.g., CattleFax) show average net margins in 2025 often exceeding $1,000 per cow after adjusting for costs and weaning rates — among the best years on record. USDA cost-and-return estimates and university analyses also show strong returns above operating costs in 2024–2025, with 2025 frequently described as record or near-record.

The rise in the farmers’ share of the retail beef dollar (from ~37% in 2021 to the low-to-mid 50% range recently) reflects this: higher cattle prices have flowed through more effectively than in the prior period when packer and retail spreads were wider relative to farm prices.

Cattle producers have done quite well over the roughly five-year window from 2021 onward. The current tight-supply phase of the cattle cycle has shifted economic leverage back toward the farm gate. Weep not for them, they are doing well.

The big question is will they expand their herds knowing this will drop prices or will they learn from homebuilders where building fewer homes keeps prices and profits high.

Of course the counter argument to this is the Cattle Cycle is Biological, Not Just Strategic . Cattle are not lumber. Herd expansion is governed by biology, not just boardroom decisions. A heifer (female calf) takes 2 to 3 years to produce her first calf. Ranchers, and there are so many, don’t simply “choose” to keep herds small; they react to massive drought conditions that wiped out pastureland in 2022–2023. Herd rebuilding is happening, but it’s slow.

If prices remain high for 3–4 years, the economic incentive to expand (sell more calves at high prices) eventually overwhelms the “keep supply tight” strategy, because if one rancher expands and another doesn’t, the expander captures all the profit.

So collusion probably isn’t happening at the Rancher level, yet. Constraints on supply will likely take pace by reducing Slaughter House capacity by the Meatpackers. Proving collusion in court is legally difficult. The packers don’t need a secret phone call; they just need to match each other’s bids and slaughter schedules, which is legal oligopoly behavior.

One interesting fact that came up is that in the past 2 years Feedlots have been keeping cattle longer (higher days on feed, heavier weights), and packing capacity has declined recently. These contribute to the dynamics of beef supply and prices,

Average days on feed have extended substantially. Historical norms were often ~90–150 days; more recent reports cite averages around 200 days in some contexts, with clear rises in cattle on feed >150 days and especially >180 days (e.g., August 2026 Cattle on Feed data showed ~3.4 million head >150 days vs. ~2.8 million a year earlier, and ~1.9 million >180 days vs. ~1.3 million).

Carcass/live weights are higher as a result (e.g., dressed weights ~27–32+ pounds above year-ago levels in recent periods; live weights frequently +25–40 pounds year-over-year). This partially offsets fewer head slaughtered.

Reasons include high cattle values (extra pounds are profitable, especially with relatively manageable feed costs in periods of lower grain prices), tighter placements of feeder cattle, and feedlots managing occupancy/turnover in a constrained supply environment.

Longer feeding adds total pounds of beef per animal but slows the rate at which cattle move through the system.

In 2025-2026 Tyson’s closed its Lexington, NE plant (~4,500 head/day capacity) and went to a single shift at Amarillo, TX; JBS ended slaughter at Souderton, PA (~2,000 head/day); and other adjustments were made. Estimates of capacity offline are around ~10,000 head/day in aggregate from these moves.

The net effect is reduced overall industry capacity

Beef production is down (e.g., ~4–5%+ year-over-year declines in recent periods/annual figures), cattle slaughter is lower (often mid-single to high-single-digit % declines), and wholesale (boxed beef) and retail prices have reached or remained near record highs amid solid demand.

This is in conjunction with tariffs on beef which are now 36% and help keep imports from reducing prices

One of the lessons learned during COVID is is the best way to keep prices and profits high is to constrain supply. We see this with housing, where builders limit the number of new units to keep prices high . We see it with refined oil products where closing refineries reduce capacity and the limited number refineries give them more pricing power much like with meat packers.

FINAL SOLUTION

We are being told the problem are entirely due to the small herd size which is due to the Big Bad Meat Packing Gang of Four screwing the poor Rancher. The solution is to let the Rancher bypass USDA inspections and sell direct to consumer and grocery stores and restaurants within their own state. Massies Prime Act bill paves the way for that. It could allow a small slaughterhouse to sell beef through a local grocery store or restaurant without becoming a conventional USDA-inspected packing plant.

Could this actually let a rancher bypass the major packers? Yes, but the economic and capacity constraints mean consumer prices would be much higher, and the lack of USDA inspections pose a safety concern

But is this needed?

Producers already may sell meat directly to consumers, known as “direct marketing,” or keep it for household consumption However, the number they process for direct marketing or household consumption is small, 23,791 head of cattle, or <2 percent of all beef cattle produced in 2017

The biggest obstacle is that owning cattle through slaughter requires a rancher to become part rancher, part feedlot operator, and part commodity trader. The economics and risks are quite different from raising calves and selling them.

A 1,000-head feeding operation can easily have several million dollars tied up in cattle alone when cattle are worth $2,500–$3,000/head

Feed availability and cost is probably one of the biggest practical constraints. A cow-calf ranch is often located where grass is available; a feedlot needs a reliable supply of corn, silage, hay and other feed. Feed prices can move dramatically while the rancher is locked into cattle purchased months earlier.

A large feedlot can spread labor, machinery, veterinary services, manure handling, feed procurement and other overhead over thousands of cattle. A rancher feeding 100–300 cattle himself can have substantially higher per-head costs

You also need a relationship with a packer. A rancher can’t simply assume that having finished cattle means a packer will give him the best available price. The largest packers typically have established procurement systems and relationships with large feedlots.

A cow-calf ranch is optimized for grass and forage production. A feedlot is optimized for rapid conversion of grain and other feed into pounds of beef. A packer is optimized for high-volume slaughter, fabrication and distribution.

Trying to combine all three stages doesn’t necessarily increase the total value created. It can simply cause the rancher to take on risks and capital requirements that specialized operators are better equipped to handle.

The main barriers are:

1. Capital requirements

   • A rancher has to finance cattle for another 6–12+ months after the normal sale point.

   • Feed, land, water, equipment, labor, veterinary costs and interest all have to be financed.

   • A 1,000-head feeding operation can easily have several million dollars tied up in cattle alone when cattle are worth $2,500–$3,000/head.

2. Feed availability and cost

   • This is probably one of the biggest practical constraints.

   • A cow-calf ranch is often located where grass is available; a feedlot needs a reliable supply of corn, silage, hay and other feed.

   • Feed prices can move dramatically while the rancher is locked into cattle purchased months earlier.

3. Economies of scale

   • Commercial feeding is much more efficient at substantial scale.

   • A large feedlot can spread labor, machinery, veterinary services, manure handling, feed procurement and other overhead over thousands of cattle.

   • A rancher feeding 100–300 cattle himself can have substantially higher per-head costs.

The key question Is the expected additional margin from owning cattle through slaughter large enough to compensate the rancher for the additional capital, feed, price, mortality, carcass-quality and marketing risk?

A rancher can bypass the Big Four meatpackers, but usually not by simply finding another buyer for live cattle. The more significant alternative is to move all the way downstream—slaughter, processing, and marketing the beef yourself or through a cooperative/local processor.

There are several models.

1. Rancher → small USDA-inspected processor → consumer

This is the most straightforward alternative.

The rancher owns the cattle through slaughter, contracts with a smaller federally inspected plant, then sells the resulting beef through:

• direct-to-consumer sales

• restaurants

• local grocery stores

• farmers markets

• online sales

• institutional buyers

If the beef is sold across state lines, federal inspection is generally required. State-inspected plants can sell within their state, and the Cooperative Interstate Shipment (CIS) program allows qualifying small state-inspected plants to ship interstate.

2. Ranchers form a cooperative

Suppose 100 ranchers each have 100–500 finished cattle annually. Individually, they’re too small to support their own slaughter/processing operation.

But collectively:

100 ranchers × 300 cattle = 30,000 cattle/year

Now they potentially have enough volume to support a regional processing and marketing operation.

The cooperative could:

• aggregate cattle

• negotiate feed and transportation

• contract slaughter

• own or contract with a processing facility

• sell boxed beef

• develop a common brand

• negotiate with grocery chains and restaurants

• distribute the beef

USDA specifically identifies producer cooperatives and aggregation/distribution as ways for small and mid-sized producers to overcome scale disadvantages.

There are precedents. USDA has documented producer organizations that aggregate cattle from multiple farms, arrange slaughter and processing, and sell the resulting beef to institutional and wholesale customers.

The problem is small processors already operate at capacity. There is a backlog of months for ranchers wanting to slaughter cattle locally. Even if every small rancher formed a cooperative, they would face “The Chicken Tax” problem: The Big Four control the logistics (refrigerated trucking, boxed beef distribution networks). A small co-op can slaughter 100 cattle, but getting that meat into a Walmart or Kroger 1,500 miles away requires a distribution network that doesn’t exist.

Slaughtering and butchering cattle is not a job most American workers want to do, and competition from the Big 4 make it an unattractive investment, so expanding slaughterhouse capacity will require breaking up the Big 4 and government incentives/subsidies.

3. Rancher → regional packer

This is probably the easiest alternative.

There are regional beef slaughter facilities that will buy cattle or slaughter cattle under contract.

That gives the rancher another outlet besides the four dominant national packers.

And this is an area where the federal government is currently trying to expand capacity. In 2026, USDA created the SPUR program, providing $500 million in temporary support for qualifying independent and mid-sized beef slaughter facilities.

USDA has also been funding expansion of small and mid-sized processors specifically to diversify the beef supply chain.

4. Rancher owns the cattle, but doesn’t own the processor

The rancher raises , backgrounds , feeds and owns cattle through slaughter but contracts with an independent processor.

The rancher avoids the enormous capital cost of building a slaughterhouse.

But there’s a catch. The meatpacker isn’t the only middleman that has to be replaced. The real economic chain is:

Cattle → slaughter → fabrication → cold storage → transportation → wholesaling → retail

The Big Four have enormous advantages because they do many of these things at huge scale.

USDA’s research found that locally marketed beef has substantially higher processing and marketing costs than commodity beef. Large processors also get significant value from byproducts that small processors generally cannot capture as efficiently.

That’s crucial to providing competitive pricing

5.You could create a parallel regional beef system:

5,000–20,000 ranchers form a regional producer cooperatives who contract with independent feedlots with retained ownership, and they also contract with regional USDA-inspected slaughterhouses who provide cooperative fabrication/boxing and regional distribution to grocery stores / restaurants / consumers

That would allow ranchers collectively to capture some of the value currently captured by the feeding, packing, fabrication and distribution stages.

The economics don’t require every rancher to become a feedlot operator or butcher. Specialization can still exist—just with the ownership and bargaining power distributed differently.

Now they potentially have enough volume to support a regional processing and marketing operation.

And while that may be great for the Rancher it’s not likely to cause prices to drop much. Capitalism today is all about maximizing profits. Consumers have shown demand for beef is relatively inelastic regarding pricing. Capitalist Ranchers have seen they can make more with smaller herd sizes and Capitalist Meat Packers know that they can keep prices high by reducing slaughter capacity

Consumers will just have to organize among themselves to combat their exploitation, but they been educated to act as individuals and not as a collective, and are polarized politically, so its probably not happening

Last but not least we should probably mention the impact of Data Centers on Beef Production and Pricing.

Our dear leader says ““The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor…..If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

Utility companies are buying cattle grazing land to transform into large-scale data centers . Local water supply will have to keep flowing to the new data center projects, rather than to ranchers who need it to keep the pasture healthy and calves hydrated

.

Cows graze in an area for a proposed data center in Utah.

Data centers need large amounts of flat land and access to water and energy, the same as farmers do.

Many of America’s aging farmers, especially in a tough farm economy may choose to sell out at high prices reducing capacity. Farming acreage has already declined by an area about the size of Maine between 2017 and 2022, according to USDA’s latest Census of Agriculture. Data centers threaten to accelerate that trend.

https://archive.is/Qql10

So as beef prices continue to rise, you know who to blame.

Oh, and one more thing. At the same time Trump announced the importing of lean beef trimmings w/o tariffs, he also authorized the importation of live Cattle from Mexico which had been paused due to concerns about the New World Screw Worm

In 2023, cases surged in Panama and Costa Rica — and then began to spread steadily northward through Mexico.

Why that happened is difficult to say but if not enough insects are released, if the mass-produced sterile populations diverge too far from wild populations, or if the production process makes the sterile males less fit than wild males then any of these could explain it.

Once the fly population began surging, the insects probably did not simply wing their way to the United States, experts said. Instead, they most likely hitched rides on infested livestock. “These flies typically move great distances because humans move animals,” Ms. Rollins said at the briefing.

From January to June 2025, more than 2,100 employees left the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which detects outbreaks, according to a watchdog report. In congressional testimony on Thursday, Ms. Rollins said staffing reductions did not affect the agency’s “ability to react and to research,” but she did not specify whether any scientists or inspectors working on screwworm response had left the agency.

Linda Qiu contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/science/new-world-screwworm-explainer.html

As indicated earlier, the border was closed to livestock at the Southern Border in November 2024. Why are cases happening now?

We reopened the border to live cattle on February 1 2025 before closing them again on May 11,2025 when news of the spread to Northern Mexico occurred . Those 100 days opened the door for livestock from infected areas, and more importantly the hoard of flies that travel with the livestock. While we may inspect the livestock but we don’t inspect the flies

With the US now breached, production capacity of sterile flies is not adequate to contain it, and you don’t just scale up overnight. It takes time. This should have been a budget priority early in 2025 , perhaps earlier, but Trumps been too busy starting trade wars and real wars and trashing the White House.

End

After all, accidents happen and “accident” implies there was no nefarious intent here. Besides, most who seem so concerned also recognize it was the COVID Policies and Vaccines that virtually every country adopted that were most harmful. Far more harmful than the relatively benign virus with an IFR comparable to flu (0.1-0.3% IFR before Omicron, and under 0.1% after Omicron).

*Note: Sasha L does but she is also a Virus Denier. Kind of like the “No Plane” 9/11 Truthers which just serves to discredit the idea of a 9/11 Conspiracy

But we funded it seems to be their major concern, and they seem to imply that without our money China could not possibly have afforded to conduct research on Sars related virus. But between Fauci and USAID PREDICT WIV got all of $1.4 million over 5 years. That wouldn’t cover Fauci’s salary. So does anyone seriously believe this?

I mean, Wow, , $1.4 million. About $1 for every person in China. Over 5 years. Does anyone seriously believe China needed this? Sure, I mean they took it because there is value in getting US government funding. Its like a star they pasted on your forehead in kindergarten for being good. It also probably helps to get your name listed as coauthor in journal articles.

But they say the funding also gave them our expertise to do such research. Thats not true. It wasn’t Daszak, Fauci or Baric that gave them this ability. Remember, guys like Baric publish their research results in Journals that are available to everyone. And hundreds of thousands of Chinese scientists and engineers were educated in US universities where they conducted research in university labs like Ralph Barics UNC and then some continue working after graduation with US companies before returning to China

Besides, neither Daszak nor Fauci had any technical skills or expertise in GOF to transfer , and Baric insists other than some humanized mice that he provided them nothing else. He even withheld sequences from his 2015 paper that used WIV sequences so they could not reverse engineer his work creating the chimeric virus that caused such an uproar. On the other hand, WIV provided Baric and the US biosecurity establishment many sequences which Baric could synthetically create viable viruses with his Reverse Genetics System to play with, sequences he would otherwise have not been able to obtain.

China of course had good reason to research Sars related viruses since these viruses are found in bats within China, and China suffered the most from the initial SARS outbreak. Does anyone seriously believe they would not have pursued this research without US funding?. Its not like China is poor. Last I checked they did not have $40 trillion in debt. Also there cost of borrowing in cheaper than US (1.8% vs 4.7% for 10 year bonds).

Now if it was an accidental lab release and China covered that up this can not be condoned. However, it is perfectly understandable.

And let’s assume this is the case. What exactly did they release? Pretty much everyone (including DoD) agrees they would have needed to have found a virus with a backbone 99% similar to Sars-Cov-2 and were able to sequence it, recognize its importance despite it being over 20% different than SARS, and then be able to isolate the virus. They were terrible at isolating viruses from samples, having only recovered 3 Sars Like Coronaviruses. Sars related viruses from fecal pellets or anal swabs do not easily transfect cells in culture so can not replicate

WIV was not as proficient at reverse genetics as Baric so they would unlikely have went to the trouble of resorting to reverse genetics to recover a virus whose full genomic sequence was quite different from SARS.

They were however interested in spike proteins that were within 25% different from SARS, which Ralph Baric called bookends. Sars-Cov-2 spike is 22% different from SARS. Is it possible that they found a virus with a 99% SC2 backbone having a spike protein 22% different than SARS (sans FCS). Maybe, but the odds are pretty low.

If they did find such a virus, would they be able to recover the full length virus via culture and isolation? Again, the odds are very low. They would also need to slap on a FCS and passage it in humanized mice to create SC2, and then accidentally leak it via infection of a lab worker. This all just strikes me as incredibly improbable.

Of course, there are those who argue they were creating a live virus so as to create a transmissible bat vaccine, as called for by the DEFUSE proposal. One problem with this is the DEFUSE proposal did not call for a full length Sars Like Virus to be used as a bat vaccine. It called for an engineered spike to be attached to a harmless pseudo virus. This could not possibly have led to SC2

What if they could not recover the full length virus, which was usually the case? Well, they could send the sequence to Ralph Baric and let him work his magic but

we are told this did not happen. Or they would recover the spike protein and slap it on a WIV1 backbone which is something they did a lot. They probably don’t bother with the SC2 backbone because how would they understand its relevance?.

Baric probably would not have understood it either, although I am less certain of that. This guy is the Godfather of Coronaviruses following in the heels of his mentor Michael Lai who was known as the Father of Coronavirus research. Barics focus in DEFUSE was the spike although he did propose creating a consensus virus in his lab with his Reverse Genetic System for reasons that seemed not aligned or necessary for the bat vaccination project.

Of course if WIV did slap a SC2 spike on WIV1 backbone this does not give us SC2. The backbone produces proteins that are essential to replication, immune evasion and transmission and like the spike must also be adopted to humans. How the SC2 backbone became adopted to humans is another question since I doubt you can do that with the humanized (hACE2) mice Baric gave them, as they lack a human immune system

So if WIV accidentally released any virus it would have been pretty much have been 99+ % natural origin. The FCS might very well have been acquired through serial passaging in humanized mice. WIV certainly had the capability to insert one. Keep in mind it was not clear that a FCS would affect the transmissibility or pathogenicity of the virus. Scientists at the Montana Biotechnology Center actually tried that in 2006 with the SARS spike and it did not do much, at least that was what there paper said

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16519916/

And according to this when the FCS is knocked out SC2 is still transmissible, albeit less pathogenic

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.00467-25

Of course Baric said in his last transcribed interview that the FCS made SC2 less transmissible and pathogenic. Did he perjure himself?. I’d love to here more

Also he said he recovered RaTG13 a year and a half ago after previously failing due to bad sequences. How did he repair bad sequences and why has he not published. RaTG13 of course looked much like SC2 RBD sans FCS

Sorry I digress. So whats the big deal? If it was an accident and if SC2 was mostly natural origin (not saying it was) it likely would have found its way to humans at some point naturally

This is not to say that someone who perhaps had virus sequences from bat caves in Laos, which were most closely related to SC2 might have been able to create a consensus virus that ended up as SC2, perhaps with assistance from AI and using accelerated evolution techniques developed by DARPA’s PROPHECY program for predictive purposes that was started up by Michael Callahan in 2009.

Callahan who was also in Wuhan early during the outbreak and his Prophecy partner in Thailand coincidentally became the first scientist outside of China to diagnose a COVID patient and sequence SC2 , days before China released their sequences

Interesting read below (slightly edited)

Dr. Michael Callahan was given a leave of absence from his senior executive role at United Therapeutics (UTHR) in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China; sent there to assist colleagues handling mass infections of the novel coronavirus under his joint appointment at a Chinese sister hospital of the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, where he has maintained a faculty appointment since 2005.

Soon, Callahan would be poring through thousands of case studies emerging from the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, examining patients in Singapore and briefing U.S. officials on the location of the next likely outbreak, according to NatGeo. The doctor marveled at the “magnificent infectivity” of the disease, which sits “like a little silent smart bomb in your community”.

On January 4, 2020, Callahan had phoned his old friend Dr. Malone in New York with news of a new emerging disease out of Wuhan, China.

Callahan, was then recruited to be Special Adviser on COVID-19 to the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR) was sent to tend to the sick aboard the Diamond Princess, which was being held in the Japanese port of Yokohama, near Tokyo.

Callahan was previously health director of USAID in Nigeria; a post he held for 4 years, carrying out research on pathogen infections in Africa, prospectively enrolling participants for cutaneous anthrax studies in Nigeria and monkey pox, as well as Ebola and Marburg virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola.

In 2002, Callahan would be tapped by the State Department’s director for the Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation to serve as “clinical director for Cooperative Threat Reduction [CTR] programs” at six former Soviet Union Biological Weapons facilities as part of the Bioindustry Initiative (BII) program, where he was officially tasked with carrying out the stated goals of the mission, which entailed the “reconfiguration of former biological weapons production facilities” in the former Soviet Union and the acceleration of “drug and vaccine production”. More specifically, however, Callahan would be put in charge of gain-of-function programs for viral agents at these facilities.

Throughout Callahan’s travels in the former Soviet Union, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) was sharing in the research and scientific innovation taking place in the former Soviet labs as part of the consortium of Massachusetts medical research institutions. In 2004, the “number 1 research hospital in the U.S.“, Mass General was taking part in the Bioindustry Initiative (BII) program, making use of the Russian technology their faculty member, Michael Callahan was in the process of discovering.

After a few years bouncing from one former Soviet lab to another, Michael Callahan would return to the United States with a head full of new ideas and a brand new job at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he could put it all to use as director of the agency’s biodefense therapeutics portfolio.

In the space of just seven years, from 2005 to 2012, Callahan would expand DARPA’s biodefense portfolio from $61 million to $260 million per year and launch eight programs that would generate nine investigational new drugs (INDs) and three new drug applications with products in market, including the injectable fungal treatment, Ambisome (Gilead), which has generated over $6 billion since approval.

The Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program was created by Michael Callahan in 2006, barely a year after he first came on board as DARPA’s portfolio manager. Its purpose was to find technologies that could “radically accelerate the manufacturing of protein vaccines and protein-based therapeutics”, with the goal of “revolutionizing protein therapeutics and vaccine manufacture” through the private sector.

Callahan would receive DARPA’s highest commendation, the DARPA Achievement Award, for his success with the Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program.

Prophecy was another program created by Callahan at DARPA. It sought to “transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive” through algorithmic programming techniques. In layman’s terms, the program proposed that “viral mutations and outbreaks“ could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.

Among the grantees of Callahan’s program was the King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, which houses the King Chulalongkorn Medical University where Callahan is a visiting professor.

In 2009, Callahan’s old employer USAID launched PREDICT, an early warning system for new and emerging diseases in 21 countries. Thailand, known for being a “hotbed of undiagnosed illnesses and viruses“ among medical experts, was among those 21 nation and a doctor described as a “giant in the field of virus discovery worldwide” was tapped by the CIA cutout to lead the PREDICT program in that country.

Dr. Supaporn “Chu” Wacharapluesadee, from the King Chulalongkorn Memorial and faculty of Medicine at Chulalongkorn University had been conducting research on viruses in bats for years and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on bat pathogens. “

Callahan and DARPA had identified Wacharapluesadee as an asset in 2004 when she discovered the Nipah virus in bats, which can affect humans and pigs. Callahan and the Thai doctor worked together on several studies. One of these, funded by the USAID PREDICT project, titled “Diversity of coronavirus in bats from Eastern Thailand“ was published in 2015 and carried out between 2008 and 2013, as well as a 2013 study on encephalitis funded by DARPA and the Thai government.

Michael Callahan would leave DARPA’s payroll and his official title of Program Manager for Biodefense and Mass-Casualty Care in 2012 and return to Massachusetts General Hospital to run a disease surveillance and antiviral clinical trials program in Africa. But, a man with Callahan’s background never quite leaves government, as he himself admitted in a UAB alumni profile: “I still have federal responsibilities to the White House for pandemic preparedness and exotic disease outbreaks,” said Callahan in 2013, “which will continue for the near future”.

Daszak, a regular advisor to WHO on pathogen prioritization for R&D, Carroll and Joana Mazet - former global director for USAID’s PREDICT - all joined together in 2016 to form the Global Virome Project; a “10-year collaborative scientific initiative to discover unknown zoonotic viral threats and stop future pandemics”. Mazet was also co-director of UC Davis’ One Health program, which recruited Dr. Wacharapluesadee and her team in Thailand to conduct a multi-year research project on bats. They are joined by Edward Rubin of Metabiota Inc, a recipient of Callahan’s PROPHECY funds at DARPA and, notably, an $18.4 million DTRA contract award for scientific research and consulting work in Ukraine and the Lugar Center in the Republic of Georgia.

EcoHealth’s Executive Vice President, William Karesh, links directly back to the very top of the U.S. biodefense establishment, as a member of ASPR Robert Kadlec’s original Blue Ribbon Panel on Biodefense along with Hudson Institute senior fellows Tevi Troy, Jonah Alexander and Scooter Libby,

The relationship between WIV

and the American Biodefense establishment was advanced by EcoHealth Alliance policy advisor, David R. Franz, former commander at U.S. bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick (USAMRIID).

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded a $6.5 millioncontract to a company called EcoHealth Alliance, Inc to carry out research on “the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia”.

Not coincidentally, EcoHealth Alliance had previously received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2014 to study coronaviruses in bats in Asia. This particular study was carried out in partnership with scientists at none other than the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Dr. Wacharapluesadee, would find herself at the center of the narrative built around the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China; namely that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) purposely withheld critical genomic information from the world at the outset of the pandemic in January, 2020.

According to a PBS.org story, on January 8, a Thai woman returning from Wuhan was “pulled aside“ at the airport over symptoms of a runny nose, sore throat and high temperature. “Supaporn Wacharapluesadee’s team”, as claimed, discovered that the woman was infected with a “new coronavirus”. Dr. Wacharapluesadee herself had allegedly succeeded in “partially” decoding the genetic sequence of the virus by the following day and reported it to the Thai government.

On January 11 along with the virus sequences from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were released. Dr. Wacharapluesadee compared her sequence with the one later published by the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center and “found it was a 100% match”, making it the first officially recorded case outside of China and effectively dropping the first domino, which would eventually lead to the WHO declaring a global pandemic two months later.

As far back as 2005, Daszak and Zhengli were conducting research on SARS-like coronaviruses in bats. Several PREDICT-funded studies on SARS-like coronaviruses and Swine Flucount with both Zhengli’s and Daszak’s contributions. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these is a 2015 PREDICT and NIH-funded study she co-authored with Ralph Baric entitled: “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence”.

https://www.sott.net/article/439296-Dr-Michael-Callahan-DARPAs-man-in-Wuhan

So anyways, I’ll just leave it at that.

End

Rear Adm. Erica G. Schwartz, MD, MPH, JD, the former Deputy U.S. Surgeon General (2019-2021) and former U.S. Coast Guard chief medical officer was confirmed as CDC director on August 5, 2026. Rand Paul voted in favor. Erica is a true believer in Vaccines and Testing and played a significant role during COVID under Trump

Only a week earlier, on July 29, Fauci gave testimony to Rand Pauls Senate committee, or more accurately listened to questions/speeches from Senators, with Rand Paul leading the way as he took the 5th. Besides the Origin/GOF him and other Republican Senators, especially Senator Moody were very concerned about COVID Policy such as lockdowns and the science behind masks, social distancing, etc. Only Senator Johnson seemed concerned about the safety.

Here is some of what Senator Paul said

Regarding the lockdowns, you argue that you did not personally issue every lockdown order, close every school or impose every mandate, but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions, and you presented your recommendations not as judgements open to debate but as dictates of science itself. Your own words demonstrate that you understood the influence you exercised.

On March 14th, 2020, you wrote that, “The task force recommendations were driven by me,” yourself, “Deb, and CDC.” The next day you wrote that you had convinced Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the New York City schools, so you were involved. That same night, Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff told you that the Governor had decided to close California schools, bars, and restaurants after watching you on television. Presidents, governors, mayors, school boards, corporations and Congress all bear responsibility for the decisions they made.

The COVID lockdown, however, could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime. Children lost years of education. Small businesses, built over a lifetime, disappeared. Patients delayed cancer screenings and other medical care. Families were separated from dying relatives. Workers were ordered to accept a medical procedure or lose their jobs. Worship assembly, employment, education, and travel were restricted in the name of science. While you did not impose every restriction, you used your public authority to justify them.

Two weeks earlier (July 15) , during her confirmation hearing Rand Paul had an opportunity to see where Erica G. Schwartz stood regarding Fauci’s Science and Policies as they related to handling of COVID

One might have expected Senator Paul to ask at least dome of the following questions

• Did you support the 2020 lockdowns?

• Were lockdowns effective?

• Would you impose them again?

• Did you support closing schools?

• Were school closures justified?

• Did you support mask mandates?

• Were cloth masks effective?

• Would you recommend mask mandates in another pandemic?

• Did you believe the six-foot distancing rule was scientifically justified?

• Did you believe COVID vaccine mandates for civilians were justified?

• Did you personally advocate the federal employee/military COVID vaccine mandates?

• Did you believe natural immunity should have changed vaccination policy?

Nada.

Paul’s questioning appears to have been built around a different issue: Who actually controls the CDC?

He was concerned that Kennedy could order the CDC to change vaccine recommendations and that a CDC director might simply comply.

That concern was shared by other senators. Bill Cassidy repeatedly asked Schwartz whether she would challenge Kennedy if he directed her to do something unsupported by science.

Schwartz’s answers emphasized that she would use science, evidence and transparency, but she stopped short of giving the categorical commitment Paul and some other senators wanted.

Paul subsequently made this a major criticism of her. Nothing can get in the way of these mRNA shots.

Schwartz was Deputy Surgeon General from 2019–April 2021.. Her federal role put her directly inside the national response. She managed the federal COVID testing effort and participated in Operation Warp Speed briefings. When it comes to COVID policies she seemingly was a ghost. Nothing on social media or media coverage. Would love yo see her texts and emails from this period

Its not only Senator Paul that dropped the ball. Senator Moody (Florida) who had some very good questions for Fauci also did not take the opportunity to pin Schwartz down on policy

Here is what she asked Fauci

On March 8th, 2020, you appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the spread of COVID-19. You were specifically asked to clear up the confusion and misinformation surrounding masks. You told the American people, “Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with a mask.” The interviewer immediately stopped you and said, “Are you sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.” And instead of walking back or qualifying your statement in any way, you doubled down. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better. It might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think it is. And often, there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with their mask. They keep touching their face.”….

Just a few weeks later, the CDC released its guidance recommending that Americans wear masks in public. You were asked to explain your original recommendation. You emphasized a very different consideration. You said, “Well, back then the critical issue was to save the masks for the people who really needed them because it was felt there was a shortage of masks.” So I want everybody to sit with that. The critical issue driving your initial recommendation to the American public was scarcity, logistics, not medical evidence. So when you told the American people there was no reason to wear a mask, what was your principal objective: giving them an honest assessment of the medical evidence or discouraging them from consuming a scare supply of masks?

Let’s talk about the six-foot distancing rule. In April 5th, 2020, an interview on CBS said, “Every time I get to that podium in the White House briefing room, I always essentially plead with people, ‘Please take a look at those very simple guidelines of physical separation,’ and they’re very, very clear. Physically separate six feet away.”

Yet when Congress finally asked you in 2024 what science supported that evidence, six-foot distance rule for COVID, you admitted you were not aware of any studies supporting it. Incredibly, you said the six-foot rule sort of just appeared and described it as an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data. That rule had real consequences. Schools didn’t open back up. Businesses didn’t open back up. Churches didn’t open back up. I could go on and on and on. And Americans were kept physically separated from one another during the most difficult moments of their lives. Many lost loved ones during that time. So Dr. Fauci, did you have any evidence to support a six-foot separation rule when you gave that advice to Americans?

Well, let’s look at the lockdowns then. By 2022, the consequences of prolonged COVID lockdowns on our children were clear from delayed development to social isolation, which is probably why you were asked in July 2022 whether you would recommend locking down schools again. And you said, “First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” but now we have your diary and it tells a very different story from the one you told the public. And I will quote, “I spoke with Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of NYC, and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly in my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools. He had already decided based on what I was saying on TV. I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC and he said he would do this based on my recommendation.” You even said that you told the president, “We should shut the whole country down.”

When she had her opportunity to pin Schwartz down 2 weeks earlier she chose to give a monologue

Senator Moody-We appreciate you being here. Um it’s so important that we have great people uh in these roles. Um, it’s important that we have uh public health authorities that not only are prepared for disasters and pandemics, but can execute on their responsibilities in accordance with the Constitution, the first principle of government to protect people’s rights. And boy did every most every government official forget that when COVID hit and especially under the last administration although you know in Florida we tried to make every decision and uh to promote the health safety welfare of people through the lens of how do we also protect people’s rights and I’m

listening to some of them questioning today and I think it’s important that we talk about this because if you’ll remember there was a time when folks wanted to shut down, shut people up in their homes, shut down churches, shut down schools, shut down businesses. In fact, they shut down the cruise industry for almost a year and a half before I came in and we litigated and pushed back legally. But they used the CDC. I think they used an old quarantine law from forever ago.

You know, that’s a big deal to a lot of people in Florida. 60% of the nation’s cruises leave out of Florida. It affects a lot of jobs. And I think that there is this new almost political insanity especially in this kind of party that seems to be taking over the Democratic party.

Um I mean at one of their conventions the Democratic Socialists they call themselves although they are an extreme authoritarian group they want to control lives. Uh they required masks and this wasn’t like during COVID. This was just recently if you took a shot. Masks, social distancing, which by the way, when I was attorney general, I led a grand jury investigation which said that that was created out of thin air with no basis in science. Uh six-foot rule.

You had to have your COVID shot to go. Oh, and you had to have your booster shot within the last 12 months. This was just to attend the convention.

This is a party that says they promote their policies and their mandates and extreme central government control over every facet of your lives over individual autonomy and that should scare every American. I don’t care where you are on vaccines. I think that is a s symbolic argument and it is an important argument of in the narrowest of circumstances where you should force someone or have a mandate on someone.

You know, Florida led the litigation charge against mandate mandatory vaccines. They wanted to tell you what you put in your body. And yes, I think making someone choose service and country over autonomy and and individual liberty, that is a discussion we need to have.

And I hope you have good answers for that. Um, but l ask you, do you believe it’s the first principle of government?government is set up and should be and should be set up to effectuate protection of individual liberties first and foremost.

Yes or no? Is that why our country was established?

Dr. Schwarz.- Thank you, Senator Moody, and thank you for meeting with me and thank you for representing the great state of Florida. Uh l absolutely I I agree with that contention.

Senator Moody- And do you believe in your service as CDC director that you are going to have to make important decisions regarding health, but at all times you will have to be mindful of individual liberty.

Dr. Schwarz -I absolutely excuse me. I absolutely agree with that contention. Yes.

Senator Moody - And I think what we are seeing now in terms of what the insanity uh on the other side of the aisle in terms of the things that they want to mandate and cram down the throats of Americans and how much control of America they want. We have to be asking every nominee what they believe the purpose of government is because we are confronting now people that believe America should be something that it wasn’t meant to be. And we have to have good, strong, bold, courageous leaders taking on these jobs that understand the evolution of this country, the success of the country, and what it was built on, and why it exists, and why we have been so successful. So, thank you for taking on these roles.

Moody elaborated on the COVID-policy problems but she did not ask Schwartz to state whether she personally agreed or disagreed with those specific policies. Instead, she used those policies as the backdrop for a set of forward-looking questions about constitutional rights and individual liberty.

Moody did not ask:

“Did you support lockdowns?”

She didn’t ask:

“Did you support school closures?”

She didn’t ask:

“Did you support mask mandates?”

She didn’t ask:

“Did you support six-foot distancing?”

And she didn’t ask:

“Do you now believe those policies were wrong?”

Instead, she effectively asked:

“Do you agree with the constitutional principle that individual liberty must be considered when you exercise public-health authority?”

And Schwartz said yes, unequivocally, twice. She will consider it and do what she will do what the boss says (just like Fauci).

So Moody clearly communicated her own assessment of the COVID response to Schwartz. But she stops short of asking the obvious follow-up:

“Were you one of the public-health officials who supported those measures?”

That’s the missing question.

Why didn’t Moody follow up with Schwartz and ask whether she herself believed those specific COVID policies violated the individual-liberty principle she had just agreed to?

The obvious answer is that Schwartz likely supported those policies and could not lie under oath with incriminating emails and texts lurking. Confirming she supported those policies would torpedo her nomination chances. Moody and Paul and other Republicans helped her out by not asking the tough questions. Trump wants her, he gets her.

She believes in Vaccines and that’s the only thing certain Republican Senators and Trump care about, aside from Senator Johnson who did not ask any questions.

Democrats mostly voted no because they foolishly think RFK Jr will actually be able to stop Vaccine approvals and recommendations. Its most Fake Wrestling partisan theater

Folks, you are being played. Fauci was yelled at in the Senate then they turned around and approved Covid shot pusher Erica Schwartz as CDC Director and the FDA approved the mRNA flu shot. Johnson, Moody & Paul voted Yea and the margin was 2 votes.

Now lets talk about that Moderna Vaccine that was approved on same day Erica Schwartz was confirmed CDC Director.

https://www.fda.gov/media/194140/download?attachment

Unbelievable that this got approved. Vaccine effectiveness of mRNA-1010 is 26-27% in those over 50, and thats by excluding anyone coming down with flu in the first 14 days after the jab due to temporary immune deficiency like with the COVID jab

For some reason when they did the trial for 65 and over they used a Comparator vaccine that was not recommended by CDC so they could not get Traditional Approval but instead had to seek Accelerated Approval which is conditional on a Confirmatory Trial while it is being marketed. Seems rather suspicious to me.

But here was the kicker

A numerical imbalance was observed for deaths coded to the MedDRA preferred term (PT) “death (without further specification)”: 23 events in the mRNA-1010 group versus 9 events in the SD/HD comparator group. When pooled with the related PTs of “sudden death” and “sudden cardiac death,” this imbalance was more pronounced: 29 events in the mRNA-1010 group versus 12 in the SD/HD comparator group.

But they decided it was ok to ignore that because of

….the absence of clustering within the 28-day postvaccination window (3 unspecified deaths in the mRNA-1010 group vs. 2 in the SD/HD comparator within 28 days), balance in all-cause mortality, and the high prevalence of serious comorbidities among decedents, the review team assesses a causal relationship between mRNA-1010 and the observed excess of unspecified-cause deaths as unlikely. Nevertheless, definitive causal assessment is precluded by the absence of autopsies in all 29 affected mRNA-1010 recipients and lack of systematic cause-of-death adjudication.

These limitations represent residual uncertainty that cannot be resolved from existing trial data.

Lets start with the absence of clustering within the 28-day postvaccination window . Why is 28 days a magic number when they have no idea based on the study as for how long mRNA keeps producing the antigenic protein?. They also did not appear to do any biodistribution study, and did not measure troponin levels to see if the jabs caused subclinical heart muscle damage

The second point is interesting. Remember, a saline placebo was not used. They used another flu vaccine which was also approved using a comparator in of placebo. Maybe both vaccines cause premature deaths. In any event fewer participants in the comparator group had unexplained death. Thats a concern.

BTW- here is clinical trial info for the comparator (Fluarix)

Trial 2 (NCT00197288) was a randomized, single-blind, active-controlled U.S. trial which evaluated subjects randomized to receive FLUARIX (N = 917) or FLUZONE (N = 910), a U.S.‑licensed trivalent, inactivated influenza vaccine (Sanofi Pasteur SA) stratified by age: 1

Note the tiny sample size

And last but not least. They say because of the high prevalence of serious comorbidities among decedents its probably not the vaccine. Well, maybe not the vaccine alone. But everyone over 50 has something wrong thats eventually going to kill them. Maybe the vaccine just accelerates the death that might not have occurred for months or years later w/o the vaccine

And remember, the trial participants were all required to have stable disease but once approved they will be given to those with unstable disease and likely will accelerate their deaths as well

But for all of that they do admit uncertainty

Nevertheless, definitive causal assessment is precluded by the absence of autopsies in all 29 affected mRNA-1010 recipients and lack of systematic cause-of-death adjudication.

These limitations represent residual uncertainty that cannot be resolved from existing trial data.

Yet they still approve it

Looking past deaths we see

Grade 3 systemic/local adverse events

5.5 % /1.7%vaccine

0.9% /0.1% placebo

Much higher for Moderna

Medically attended adverse events

12.0% vaccine

12.3% placebo

Imagine, taking a jab to give you a 27% chance of not getting the flu gives you a 12% chance of suffering an event that required medical treatment. 😂

Just sign me disgusted

I did put myself through the pain of watching the VRBAC meeting. There are no words to describe that shit show. Just as bad as Pre-RFK Jr VRBAC

https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/events/event-fda-vrbpac-meetings/fda-vrbpac-meeting-moderna-mrna-influenza-vaccine-review

Anyways, they are now focusing on getting these vaccines approved for everyone including kids

End

One thing most people overlook with is that every ground breaking new technology since World War II has been funded by the USG, much of it by the Military, and in many cases it was developed by them before being handed off to the private sector for private use.

This is because most if not all technology is dual use so we don’t want it in the hands of adversaries militaries before we have developed military applications sufficiently. This helps ensure we stay far ahead of them.

The Internet is a prime example. It is said the military uses new technology up to 10 years before it is seen by consumers in the private sector. Some say longer.

That said, Operation COVID was so complex with so many moving parts I sometimes question if a conspiracy of this magnitude could be pulled off even by a group of very smart men . After all you would need Total Information Awareness (TIA) to monitor news and social media in real time so as to evaluate dangerous information and trends in population perceptions that could screw up the Operation and lead to revolution. This means collecting vast amounts of data and screening with AI , something Palantir does well.

With AI enhanced TIA they could adjust the messaging as needed and shutdown voices who were conveying ideas that were a problem. They did this well.

And remember, this was a Global Conspiracy so it was not just the US that needed to be considered but many different countries. The Global coordination was remarkable although different countries were allowed some room to adjust policies to fit their particular needs. That said, most adopted social distancing, masking, some degree of lockdowns and travel restrictions while restricting the use of HCQ and Ivermectin and pushing vaccination while censoring views challenging these measures

One of the most telling signs of a conspiracy was in January 2020 France restricted the sale of HCQ when it had been available OTC for over 60 years. At the time there was not a single case of COVID outside China.

Many of the mitigation measures adopted were against WHO’s own recommendations that were in place at the time and they simply turned 180 degrees on a dime. There was also an almost universal reluctance to consider that the virus was airborne and to recommend ventilation, despite Vincent Munster at RML verifying small aerosols and significant residence time in air by early 2020.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973

As pointed out by Toby Rogers and other’s almost every measure they adopted was detrimental

This leads me to Peter Thiel, currently hiding out in Argentina. Peter of course is a huge backer of Trump, and Palantir is a major user of AI. Trump set up the NSCAI in 2018 (National Security Commission on AI). Thiel was a huge beneficiary of Operation COVID and the NSC was responsible for the COVID policies in PanCAP adopted for COVID.

Edited excerpts from Max Chafkins book “The Contrarian”

Much of Thiel’s net worth was still tied up in Palantir, a company that was almost uniquely positioned to profit from the coronavirus and of which he held a little less than one-fifth of the equity, personally and through his investment firms.

Years earlier, [Thiel] set in motion events that made inevitable the 2014 theft of user data by Cambridge Analytica’s and Facebook’s complicity in pro-Trump misinformation during the 2016 campaign, so had he planted many of the seeds that led to the failed insurrection.

The virus was a problem for doctors, virologists, and epidemiologists to solve, but in the near term it was a data problem.

Palantir’s software, rewritten after the company’s attempt to win business in Europe, was already being used to manage some health care supply chains, but starting in early March, the company moved all its research and development employees to work on COVID-related problems, adding functions to its existing offerings that would, for instance, allow corporate clients to easily pull in government data about cases and hospitalization numbers and then incorporate that into their sales projections. For government health departments, which were all scrambling to find anything to help bolster their supply chains and modeling, the software was a natural fit and was used to distribute ventilators and personal protective equipment. The push led to more than a hundred new deals with customers in a matter of months, including dozens of public health agencies.

In early May, the Department of Health and Human Services, which had already given Palantir a contract after Thiel and Sankar had met with NIH director Francis Collins, awarded it two more contracts, worth $25 million, to design a new software system that would be used by the White House Coronavirus Task Force to track cases, hospital data, supplies of personal protective equipment, and testing sites. The deals were classified as “emergency acquisitions,” meaning they were awarded without competing bids.

Thiel had anticipated a global crisis that would bring the world economy to its knees, and he’d positioned himself to profit from that chaos, just as he’d called the financial crisis and set movement, and the social media companies’ censorship of stories linking the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter to corruption.

WHILE THE COUNTRY continued to reel, Thiel was busy cashing out. On August 25, as the country surpassed 175,000 deaths, Palantir submitted its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission—the formal document announcing its intention to go public.

The Palantir filing wasn’t just an ideological statement—it presented a portrait of a company that was capitalizing on the pandemic, and more broadly on the Trump era.

Palantir had taken in $466 million in revenue in 2016; it had generated more in just the first half of 2020. The U.S. Army accounted for $79 million of this-more than 15 percent of total revenue-and other government contracts, including the Maven deal and the company’s work with ICE and HHS services, would add tens of million more.

The S-1 showed a thicket of venture capital firms, investment vehicles, and entities connected to him in one way or another. He owned shares through multiple Rivendell funds, the name linked to his IRA, as well as through Mith-ril, Founders Fund, Clarium, PT Ventures, STS Holdings, and others.

This added up to roughly 20 percent of the company, but Thiel, who’d long been a fan of dictatorships, had arranged things to give himself far more control than even that would imply. Beyond a board of directors loyal to the founder, Palantir had created a new class of shares that would control just under 50 percent of the voting power. These shares would be held in a trust controlled by three men: Karp, Stephen Cohen, and Thiel-and at any time Thiel could choose to use some of his other shares to increase that percentage, giving him de facto control. Incredibly, they would maintain this level of control even if they sold large chunks of their stock, which Thiel was planning on doing immediately.

The stock opened at $10 a share, making Palantir worth about $20 billion. Thiel immediately began cashing out, selling shares worth more than $250 million personally, and then another $20 million or so through Founders Fund. The country might have been in crisis, and his political project was collaps-ing-but he was doing fine.

Thielverse was abuzz with anecdotes about secret uncounted votes in key swing states and about a general sense that the truth— that Joe Biden, the candidate supported by a decisive majority of Americans, had won the election—was somehow in doubt.

Eric Weinstein, a Thiel employee and Intellectual Dark Web podcaster, tweeted videos of a purported postal service whistleblower (distributed by conservative journalist and provocateur James O’Keefe, another person who had once called Thiel a patron). He warned that Trump was being “played off” by the media without due process. Blake Masters, who was preparing for another possible Senate run, with Thiel backing his campaign, tweeted darkly about the Dominion voting machines used in Arizona, picking up on a conspiracy theory alleging that the electronic voting machine manufacturer somehow changed people’s votes and claimed, offering no evidence, that dead people had voted in Milwaukee and Detroit.

These all turned out to be false.

Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary intellectual and Thiel’s longtime friend, went much further. He published an essay that claimed that voters in “urban communities” had, through some mix of manipulation by organizers and actual voter fraud, stolen the election for Biden,

Yarvin suggested that Republicans execute what he called a “very legal coup” to “steal the election back” by getting Republican-controlled state legislatures to invalidate the vote, and then having Trump claim emergency powers, ignoring any interference from Congress or the judiciary and using the National Guard to enforce his orders.

Trump’s loss would cause Trumpism to thrive —as Thiel had always hoped. He predicted a restoration in 2024. “Red America’s story gets much simpler and easier to sell,” he wrote,

Amid the uncertainty and rising deaths, Palantir’s stock price started to climb thanks to a collection of new COVID-related con-tracts, including a recently announced one to help the Department of Health and Human Services track vaccines. By early January [2021], it was worth more than $40 billion.

Palantir’s market capitalization would rise as high as $68 billion.

Thiel’s ideology is not especially coherent, but to the extent there was an ideology, it was that a less democratic America, purged of its multicultural delusions and pieties, would somehow lead to economic and technological progress. A critic might call this fascistic; Thiel called it going “back to the future.”

Thiel spoke to Die Weltwoche, a Swiss newspaper whose editor Roger Köp-pel is a member of the country’s national-con-servative People’s Party. During an interview with Köppel, Thiel characterized the disease as a mental pathology rather than a physical one. “I see it as a psychological indicator that people know deep down: There is no way back to the old normal,” he said.

He continued: “COVID-19 created a shift. There used to be this feeling that the future was being held back somehow. Changes that should have taken place long ago did not come because there was resistance. Now the future is set free.”

Thiel has also contributed to a reactionary turn in our politics and society that has left the United States in a much more uncertain place than he found it in when he went into business for himself in the mid-1990s. He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world’s largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet. “He’s a nihilist, a really smart nihilist,” said Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly activist and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “He’s entirely about power—it’s the law of the jun-gle. ‘I’m a predator and the predators win.’” That, more than anything, may be the lesson that Thiel’s followers have learned—the real meaning of “move fast and break things.”

Thiel had other contacts who were close to the Biden administration. Avril Haines, a 2020 campaign adviser and, in January, the new Director of National Intelligence, had served as a consultant for Palantir. A disclosure showed that just before joining Team Biden, she’d worked for Thiel’s defense contractor, which paid her $180,000 in fees between July 2017 and June 2020.

Thiel has surrounded himself with supporters and admirers who have protected him and enriched him. They-the PayPal Mafia, the Thielverse, and Silicon Valley itself, in all its hypocrisy and greed, and, yes, in its brilliance too-are part of his legacy.And yet it is a legacy that feels a little bit shallow.

Thiel has disseminated his reactionary ideas and made great sums of money, but he may be forever marooned in his own contrarianisman ideology that is inherently isolating, after all.

Thiel’s life has been full of important relationships, but few that seem to transcend money or power.

I cant say for sure that AI played a major role in the successful planning and execution of Operation COVID , nor can I find clear evidence that Thiel had any role in the planning of Operation COVID but its something to ponder.

End

One more thought. Perhaps AI was even used to engineer Sars-Cov-2. I was always intrigued by the idea of a consensus sequence but the problem was there were no publicly known viruses close enough to create SC2 by consensus. Ideally you would have a number of viruses 20-25% divergent from SARS (bookends) to play with. We had none (talking about entire sequence not just spike)

Between 2020-2021 we had a flurry of bookends come out, starting with RaTG13 and then the BANAL viruses from Laos. The funny thing is RaTG13 was sequenced in 2018 and perhaps leaked to Baric and the Military funded bat sampling in Laos in 2017 (Naval Medical Research Center-Asia (NMRC-A) in support of the DoD Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (DoD-GEIS) ) . The samples came from bats located near the bat caves that the 2020 BANAL samples came from, yet they never published any coronavirus sequences. Perhaps the Military had a secret database of viruses from which to generate consensus sequences

As I pointed out in my last Baric post I found it quite interesting nobody asked Baric about the consensus sequence part of his DEFUSE proposal in the morning session. I suppose they saved this for the classified afternoon session

While people focus on Fauci they fail to consider the Military funding of Eco Health Alliance, mostly by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) dwarfed that of HHS, and CIA cutout USAID’s Predict gave them more than DoD or HHS/NIAID

Meanwhile DARPA was soliciting GOF grant requests from the top labs in the West under the name of PREEMPT. Daszak and Barics DEFUSE proposal was rejected because they did not like the idea of vaccinating bats in an uncontrolled setting (Chinese bat caves). But they did like some aspects of the proposal, no doubt Barics section which included FCS insertion and generating a consensus sequence, perhaps for a live attenuated vaccine for human soldier. This is something they could have proceeded to do w/o Baric or Daszak. Indeed one of the labs which obtained PREEMPT funding was a lab Baric worked with which you know as Rocky Mountain Labs. This is a NIAID funded lab which housed Egyptian Fruit Bats and Sars-Cov-2 infects and replicate well in these bats but don’t do as well in the Horse Shoe Bats in China that it is supposed to have come from

While there is no evidence the Military funded such research, under FASAB 56 in 2018 they can legally hide the nature of any spending due to national security concerns. This is the primary reason they have never passed an audit.

Another interesting DARPA program I have mentioned before is PROPHECY, which started up in 2009 which was the same year as USAID PREDICT, and the same year as the fake 2009 Pandemic. Callahan was a former member of DTRA and familiar with former Soviet Biolabs, including those in Ukraine. PROPHECY worked on the accelerated evolution of viruses supposedly to help create therapeutics and vaccines for viruses suspected of having pandemic potential, including those viruses that PREDICT found.

How do you accelerate the evolution of viruses?. Well, serial passaging is one way, in-vitro (lab cultures) or in-vivo (live animals including humans). Viruses that are prone to recombination events such as coronaviruses might be susceptible to accelerated evolution techniques, and perhaps AI would be useful in this regard in terms of screening many millions of recombinant sequences

Its also worth considering Fauci’s role as head of biodefense funding in conjunction with his role as head of NIAID. This job was given to him at the direction of Dick Cheney who was looking for a civilian cover for the Military’s biological weapons program which they claimed was for defensive purposes to create therapeutics and vaccines. Having Fauci as the poster boy for biodefense research helped obscure the military’s role. In return Fauci became the highest paid person in government making more than the President

Well, I am starting to ramble a bit so will end this here.

This is essentially a 3 year diary/media scrapbook covering 2020-2023. Actually since it starts on page 600 something he probably started it at some point before COVID, perhaps as early 2017. Sure would have liked to seen those pages., There is for some reason a big gap in the COVID YEARS, where there are no entries from late November 2021 to May 31,2022 which coincided with the Omicron outbreak and the period of largest numbers of COVID deaths. This was also a period of talk about biolabs in Ukraine

Much like the Epstein Files the Organized Mob try to make much about nothing by taking things out of context or treat it as something new when it’s been known for ages. Whatever sells I guess.

I am somewhat taken aback at how little there is, especially related to the “Science”. Fauci seems more like an administrative and political geek dazzled by his inflated ego and not very bright at that. Of course he was 80 years old so I give him that.

He clearly was not the master mind of anything but surely was part of the Operation COVID conspiracy. Perhaps a useful idiot or scapegoat for the right to disguise the fact that it was Trumps Administration that ran Operation COVID, primarily the NSC which includes a fusion of military, health and intelligence agencies. Only those at the top were privy to the big picture.

Keep in mind that Trumps NSC classified all COVID policy discussions starting in mid-January 2020 before there was a single case in the US. Fauci of course was involved in those policy meetings and as such was likely prohibited from discussing or even writing about certain things in his diary. Indeed the COVID policies Fauci supported including lockdowns came from the NSC (PanCAP adopted for COVID on March 13,2020)

What motivated Fauci to keep a diary beyond serving as an outline for his memoirs I cant say. Perhaps nothing, just for the memoirs he planned to write. Or maybe he thought it would be useful for his defense if he got prosecuted. In any event I found it to be a Limited Hangout and not very enlightening

Before I get to the excerpts a couple of notes on what is missing.

No mention of the CREID Network

Nothing on the DARPA Defuse release on September 2021.

Nothing about DRASTIC

Nothing about Baric except in a NYT excerpt

No mention of his NEJM paper he coauthored with Robert Redfield on March 26,2020 , only 10 days after Trumps NSC locked us down, where they said

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This

suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to

those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957

and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

https://www.paul.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/2026.07.24_Tonys-Diary-Package.pdf

Nothing about Ivermectin. Very little concern about finding treatment for COVID among approved drugs

Little concern about the Vaccines safety, even during the worst surge of the Pandemic as the vaccines were being rolled out. Fauci speculated that perhaps a new variant was responsible but never entertained that the increased cases and deaths could be due to the vaccines. Never mentioned VAERS reports or V-Safe.

After February 2020 Fauci never mentioned what the case fatality rate was, probably because it was confirmed to be low except in the elderly

Seemed oblivious that increased testing in hospitals could be due to increased testing of all patients and drive up hospitalization cases, but Fauci denied this

Never mentioned they needed to adjust Remdesivir trial endpoint to get approved.

The trial protocol originally used a mortality-status endpoint but was amended to use time to recovery before the interim analysis. The reduction in mortality was not statistically significant. Also the placebo was not saline but Sulfobutylether beta-cyclodextrin sodium (SBECD) which is used in Remdesivir and has an effect on the kidney

Didn’t mention the NSC’s PanCAP as adopted for COVID

Didn’t seem rigorously consider the impact of lockdowns, school closures, social isolation, and fear on excess deaths and determine if the costs outweighed the benefits . After all, deaths were mostly in the elderly like with flu. Being an elder myself I recognize we are all going to die anyways, and we are already on the door step. I am convinced many of these deaths were related to the mitigation measures. We can only estimate how many.

The fact so many countries did the same thing is what makes this a Global Conspiracy. Fauci never mentions Taiwan but in Taiwan COVID was not a problem until the Vaccine came out in May 2021. Following the booster it literally exploded in 2022 despite everyone wearing masks and being vaccinated and excess deaths remained high until the 2nd half of 2025.

So lets get to the excerpts of his diary, or not, your choice. This is mostly for my own reference anyways.

Jan. 16, 2020 - The situation in Wuhan, China continues. Now have 2 deaths and 2 cases in Thailand and 1 in Japan. Was in on a PCC meeting via the NIH SCIF with the NSC chaired by Anthony Ruggiero. CDC and DHS have decided to do entry screening at 3 USA airport in people coming directly and indirectly from Wuhan: Kennedy in NYC, LAX, and SFO.

Tomorrow night at 10:00 PM a 747 from Wuhan will arrive at Kennedy and will be the first to get screened.

My Note-Trumps NSC ordered that all COVID Policy discussions he classified and held in a SCIF. Strange

Jan. 26, 2020 - GAME ON!!! Things are changing rapidly. Dr. Ma Xiaowei, the Chinese Minister of Health gave a press statement saying that the incubationperiod of nCoV is 1 to 14 days and that the virus is being transmitted when people are asymptomatic! This has enormous implications for how we handle people from Wuhan (like our diplomats who are now on the way back from WUHAN, having been ordered to evaculate). Should we quarantine them.

I am very skeptical about the Chinese interprepation of their data. I spoke with Mike Ryan (WHO) from Geneva and he and Tedros are going to Wuhan soon. Mike is very skeptical that aymptomatic spread is present or at worst is a major driver of spread. Mike Osterholm also feels this way.

I spoke with Nancy Messonnier and Bob Redfield this AM to coordinate our responses. Bob and I feel (and I told Elizabeth Cohen this) that we should be allowed to send our CDC epidemiologists to China to work with them so that we see the data first hand since we will base important response activities and strategies based on whether this is true. It would require our quarantining for a period of time even asymptomatic people who arrive from Wuhan.

My Note-Trump allowed the last CDC Epidemiologist to be withdrawn from China in July 2019

It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread.

Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.

My Note: Some of the Lab Leakers making this sound like Fauci discounted natural origins and animal spill over. This is not the case

Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.

There is complete chaos in China now with president Xi Jinping declaring an emergency situation. The Chinese are building within days 1000 and 1300 bed hospitals and flying in hundreds of medical personnel from military. They have shut down travel within most of the country and have called off many Lunar New Year events. Schools closed at least until mid-February. Running out of supplies such as PPE.

Had 8:00 PM call with Anthony Ruggiero, Phil Ferro, and Bob Redfield about the evolving situation. The deputions and White House are pushing to close the borders for any traffic from China Bob and I are against that. Anthony said that he heard that I wa in favor of that. Will have 11:00 AM meeting tomorrow from SCIF with Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger regarding possibly closing borders from China entry.

Jan. 27, 2020 - Packed day today. Council and multiple important non-corona-virus meetings.

Busy day - two meeting with White House via SCIF. First at 11:00 AM led by Deputy Director NSC Matt Pottinger who still wants to stop all incoming from China. Bob Redfield, Phil Ferro, Mart Cetron, Peter Marks etc.

Second White House meeting via SCIF was on same subject with Mick Mulvaney Chairing and visit to meeting by VP Pence. Still discussing the pros and cons of shutting off China. I tried to squeeze in my opinion, but it was touch since I was remote. briefed Azar beforehand by phone as to the down side (historically) in shutting out a country. Also at the meeting were Joe Grogan, Matt Pottinger, Alex Azar, DHS

Jan. 30, 2020 - The chaos: We had 2 PCCS led by Ruggiero and one Deputies lead by Mick Mulvaney with the usal cast of characters. Case in point. Mart Cetron who was listening in on the WHO call said that the epidemic was accelerating that this is was clear that the incubation period was shorter (2-5 days than was previously felt and that asymptomatic transmission was occurring. Thus, it was agreed to present to the POTUS a revised plan for containment: The 200 people at March Base would be quarantines for 15 days.

Anyone coming in from Wuhan would be quarantined for 15 days.

The number of cases today are: 9480 with 213 deaths. It is increasing by about 25% per day. In 1 month it has surpassed SARS for 1 year (8000).

WHO Declares a PHEIC

The POTUS announced the Coronavirus Task Force today

Jan. 31, 2020 - Another truly amazing day. Sequested in the White House essentially all day working out a proposal to put before the POTUS that would restrict travel from China. The proposal was driven largely by CDC (Marty Cetron) who felt that given the volume of people coning in from China by direct and even more importantly indirect flights it would be logistically impossible to effectively screen people at many, many airports and the diversion of people from their place of origin to selective airports would further complicate things. Also, the cases continue to sharply rise with 12000 cases and 259 deaths.

In addition, the WHO declared a PHEIC yesterday prompting Azar to declare a Public Health Emergency here in the USA. I disagreed with the latter since there were only 7 infections (6 travel) at the time.

Presentation was made to the POTUS by Azar, Bob Redfield and me. Trump as he did a couple of ddays ago posed many questions to me making sure that I thought it was a good idea. I said this was an imperfect process, but the best choice we have right now. He questioned me about what the difference was between this and flu. He somewhat brashly suggested even more stringent restrictions and was dissuaded by Kellyanne.

She clearly has influence over the POTUS.

When I got back to my office, got call from Jeremy Farrar who sounded very concerned and conferenced me in with Kristian Anderson, an evolutionary biologist from Scripps. They had also been talking with Eddie Holmes, another evolutionary biologistfrom Sidney Australia.

There have been conspiracy theories that the virus was given GOF by inserted mutations and deliberately or accidentally released in Wuhan. One theory was written by Indian investigators that HIV sequences were inserted by a Chinese person in Canada and released in Wuhan. Everyone thinks that is crazy, but the Farrar phone call was different. The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary “jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates. They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.

Jeremy was calling me for advice. I suggest that we get a larger group of qualified evolutionary biologists/virologists together under the auspices of a convening body and carefully look at this. We agreed to convene by phone the next day.

We decided to have a 2-pronged approach strongly suggested by Kadlec who felt we had security responsibilities to investigate this ourselves. He would do this through OSTP and NAS. Meanwhile I would pursue a multinational approach with Jeremy. I decided to now bring in Francis.

Feb. 1, 2020 - Conference call at 2:00 PM with Jeremy, Francis and several other scientists gathered by Jeremy (see below).

rticipants in the Feb., 2020 call included:

• Francis Collins, Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S.;

• Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. Nutional institute titute of Allergy and Infectious

• Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust;

• Patrick Vallance, U.K. Chief Scientific Adviser and Head of the Government Science and Engineering;

• Kristian Anderson, Director of Infectious Disease Genomics, Scripps Research
  Translational Institute, CA, U.S.;

• Christian Drosten, Director of Human Virology at the German Center for Infection Research at Charité - Universitätsmedizin, Germany;

• Edward Holmes, Professor of Viral Evolution at University of Sydney;

• Andrew Rambaut, Professor of Molecular Evolution, University of Edinburgh’s

• Institute of Evolutionary Biology, U.K.;

• Ron Fouchier, Deputy Head of Department of Viroscience, Erasmus Medical
  Center, NL;

• Robert Garry, Professor of Virology, Tulane University School of Medicine,
  Louisana, U.S.;

• Mike Ferguson, Professor of Life Sciences at University of Dundee, U.K.; and

• M.P.G. Koopmans, Head of Department of ViroScience, Erasmus Medical
  Center, NL.

My Note: Ralph Baric has to be a spook. He said he was on the call but even Fauci did not know.

There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this. This is expected of him since he was the original GOF person with Yoshi Kawaoka. Also, Christian Drosten was with Ron; the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go. We decided to have Jeremy with Francis to contact Tedros with Stewart Simonson’s help (1 arranged this) to see if Tedros would convene experts.

My Note: I find it hard to believe that if Baric was on the phone as he said that he would not have weighed in unless he was just a mole who was listening in to report back to his controller at DoD or Spook HQers. I remember the bastard on TwIV in March during the lockdown joking he had stock pile of toilet paper and was willing to sell at $10 a roll

Also, There are 2 GOF definitions. Banned GOF is that which in increases function of pathogenic human viruses, and GOF which is not banned such as in bat viruses like Sars related coronaviruses. WIV was doing the latter which is not banned

Feb 3, 2020

Spoke with George Gao tonight in China. George is the Director General of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He confirmed that infected people can be asymptomatic and that asymptomatic people can transmit.

Also, George was very sensitive and understandably defensive since he was the one who said early on that there was no human to human transmission and that the original 27 cases in the wet market reported on December 31, 2019 were animal to human when actually human to human transmission was occurring weeks before. The Wuhan health officials did not tell him this and he thus gave out false information. This lapse likely allowed the outbreak to take hold since Wuhan went about their business with 40,000 pot luck festivals without social distancing.

Feb. 6, 2020 - Cases continue to soare with 28,018/563. Another packed day mostly at HHS and White House. Conspiracy theories still abound. The NAS group with OSTP met (see above) and decided that there was no clear evidence of malfeasance, but it should be looked into

Feb. 7, 2020 - 61 infections on Japanese cruise ship.

Feb. 8, 2020 - Infections and quarantine of the Japan ship (61 so far, including some USCits.

Tom Frieden called me this AM and we discussed various aspects of the outbreak. He and I are on the same page in thinking that this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%.

My Note: Fauci never came back to this again in his diary. Since when do we lockdown for a bad flu

Feb. 11, 2020 - 13th American infected (San Diego). One of the people air-evacuated by State to Miramar from Wuhan. Minimal sxs.

A PCC document that I just read is proposing that even in Phase IV (see below) we should continue INA 212 (f) travel restrictions. I disagree with this since travel restrictions are to delay the entry of disease into your country. Once you have sustained transmission in your country, it is a waste of resources to try to keep out travelers. I cannot be on the PCC call this AM (on a panel at the Aspen Institute in DC) and so I called Bob Redfield and asked him to respresent me and my reservations about this:

My Note: PCC- Policy Coordination Committees within the U.S. National Security Council

Phases of U.S. Government Response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)

Phase IV —Mitigation

• Description: Travel restrictions put in place by active INA 212(f) proclamations remain in place. Limit non-essential domestic travel, cancel public gatherings, social distancing, execute private sector and government continuity of operations.

• Triggers: Wide-spread domestic human to human transmission, could be in cities or regional.

• Objectives: (1) Preserve the functioning of critical infrastructure and mitigate impact to the economy and functioning of society, and (2) support community responses to the extent possible to mitigate illness, suffering, and death.

• Messaging: XYZ.

• Specific Department and Agency Activities: XYZ.

My Note: The agenda was finalized with PanCAP adopted for COVID on March 13 by Trumps NSC. PanCAP had most recently been revised in 2018 during Boltons tenure. Bolton curiously left in September 2019 just as COVID was to break out. This would lead to Matt Pottinger becoming Deputy National Security Adviser who would become a proponent of draconian mitigation measures

Finalized March 13,2020 by NSC calling for lockdowns.

Lockdowns announced March 16

FEMA and DHS would later be made lead agencies to implement the NSC COVID Policy.

Fauci clearly supported this but he was not the only driver.

Mar. 13, 2020 - 132,382/4981 USA 1694 Deaths. Primary health care facilities.

Hot areas - WA, CA, MA, NYC

I thought that it would be a quiet day since the TF meeting was called off. However, at 2:00 PM, I was called down to the White House since the POTUS wanted me next to him at the podium of the Rose Garden as he made the announcement of deckaring at “National Emergency” which would give him and the Secretary of HHS the power to remove many constraints in response to a national emergency. Also on the podium were the CEOs of the major private sector companies that would make tests readily available - CVS, Target, Walmart, etc. I was at the posium and answered many questions of the press in the Rose Garden.

I will be on the 5 Sunday Showes 2 days from now (The “Fauci Five”). Prior to that, I was involved in helping to proof the speech he would give. There were some glaring errors in the speech that I corrected. Got to meet Hope Hicks who was very nice. Jared is playing a major role in all of this.

After the presser the White House people showed me a minute by minute graph of the stock markert from the time the POTUS went to the podium and it went down to the 45 minutes of the speech and questions. The DOW went up in 45 minutes 1980 points, which was the greatest single increase in market history

Mar. 16, 2020 - Came out with the guidelines that reflected my pushing for a more aggressive mitigation 15 day strategy → If you are elderly, self-isolate; do not congregate in groups > 10 people; stay away from bars, restaurants, theaters, sporting events; if a community has community spread CLOSE the bars, restaurants and places of congregation; close schools where there is community spread; no visitors to nursing homes; if family member is sick, others in family should take extra percautions; only necessary travel, telework as much as possible.

Press conference after was highly attended. Stock market dropped by 3000 points, the biggest percentage drop in history.

My Note: I wonder how much the insider traders made on this

March 26,2020

Had a very difficult experience today. The POTUs called my cell and screamed at me because I had mentioned to the Press (likely on a Howard Bauchner podcast or a Politico interview that the duration of immunity for common coronaviruses was 6 months to 1 year and that although we do not know the duration of vaccine immunity, it is possible that we may have to use additional boosts. Apparently the press blew this up and said that the vaccine will only protect for a very short time. The POTUS was very angry. He said I cannot keep doing this to him. He said he loves me but the country is in trouble and I am making it worse. He said the stock market only went up 600 points and it should have gone up 1000 points and so I cost the country $1 trillion.

Quite a phone call.

March 27,220

USA now has more cases than any country in the world

To my surprise yesterday, the POTUS sent a letter to Governors outlining a plan to reopen county by county while monitoring the spread of virus in the low risk counties. This was half-baked and never shown to Deb or I before it was sent out.

It was derived by Jared and Kevin Hassett (modeler) and I cannot see how it can be implemented. I am surprised at Jared, who is usually very measured. This is reckless since it would require monitoring with much testing by CDC and they do not even know about it. Poor Bob Redfield is totally out of it.

My Note: Jared Kushner’s role in Operation COVID and Lockdowns should not be understated

IMPORTANT DAY - There has been a disconnect between what we in the TF have been saying about the availability of PPE (particularly masks) and ventilators and whether the people in the trenchs (ICUs) are actually getting them. We keep saying that the equipment is out there and the medical centers just need to get them and the medical centrers are saying that they are trying to get them and either they do not know how or the USG is outbidding them for the equipment.

I got on the phone via Cliff’s treatment guidelines committee that he is organizing and listened to ICU docs from all over the country. The are very fearful of running out of PPEs within days to a weeks. Ventilators are mostly a NYC issue; they may fall behing and still there is this tension of Cuomo asking for 30,000 vents and USG (us) sayng that the vents are in the warehouses; they just need to get them. I promise the group I would try to fix this nonsense.

At the TF meeting, I took over and said we really have to stop this shit and fix this.

We are acting like these people have everything they need and the fact is they do NOT. I was very empnatic and the VP (good for him) listened. We had FEMA (Pete ) and Adm Pete on the screen and the Adm acted like a rigis navy officer saying that they did their job and got the vents and PPEs to the warehouse and now it is up to the locals to get it distributed. I essentially said that this is bullshit and we need to communicate to them how they can actually get the material. I asked is it our job to just check our own boxes or are we trying to actually get the job done in real life. Clearly, Adm Pete is not happy with me, but so what!

Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway strongly agree with me as does Marc Short and the VP. The VP order to make this happen. Also, the POTU finally invoked the DA to have GM make ventilators and we are stopping (via me) saying that NYC has enough. Just give them what they ask for and if it is overkill, they they can return them and give to others.

Important discussion with Deb Birx that I have some concern about. She is using a model from Chris Murray to plot out how to delay the POTUS from pulling the plug for at least 2 weeks more. Critical issue that I feel strongly about and discussed with Cliff is that if we are going to lift restraints on certain areas, we must have the capability of flooding the system with people to do identification, isolation (out of the home) and contact tracing. Otherwise, we will precipitate a surge as is NYC, NOLA, and other locales. Big discussion coming over the weekend.

POTUS signed $2.2 Trillion (up to $6.2 trillion) relief package for the economy to give aid to laid off workers and other vulnerables. POTUS signed bill in the OVAL and actually delayed the signing until I wa called from the lower West Wing lobby to be there for the signing. When I entered the OVAL the POTUS said, “Anthony, come here with us. I cannot sign this without you being here”.

The entire crowd in the OVAL including several Senate (McConnell) and House (McCarthy) leaders and Cabinet members present applauded me as I entered

Very embarrassing. I am not comfortable with this attention. After the signinf, the POTUS asked me and others to make comments before the many TV cameras that were let into the OVAL

Very laborious press conference where the POTUS rambled on. He wasted the opportunity to just focus on the relief package and went into his diatribe against previous administrations.

My Note: Government spending trickles up and most of it eventually ends up in billionaires pockets and COVID made a lot of billionaires richer. This is the real Socialism in this country. Not exactly what Marx imagined

March 28,2020

AMAZING interaction with POTUS. Today Trump tweeted that he was considering quarantining the NY tri-state area (NYC, NJ. CN). This triggered a major news buzz. Gov. Cuomo called me; I was in my NIH office getting ready to do the Saturday TF meeting from the NIH SCIF. Cuomo asked me to help dissuade the POTUS since he (Cuomo) would have to forcibly push back on this and would defy National Guard troops sent to enforce the Quarantine.

At the TF meeting we had major discussions lead by VP. I helped convince people that a quarantine was not tenable and that we should recommend to POTUS to do a “strong travel advisory” that the governors would strongly support instead of having the Feds enforce a quarantine.

I thought that I was finished for the night and would go home to an evening off when the

My Note: I don’t expect the Lab Leakers will give Fauci credit for avoiding Federal Quarantine which would make Lockdowns look like easy street.

VP said I should come down to his office and we should, together with Deb, Chad Wolff, Steve Mnuchin, Mark Meadows, Marc Short meet with the POTUS to tell him our recommendation to announce tomorrow.

We met with the POTUS in the living quarters (not the OVAL) for about 1 hour. I led the discussions since the POTUS kept referring to me. It was a disturbingly rambling discussion since he kept talking about TV ratings, and HC, and influenza and virtually everything else as I was trying to keep him on track (with the help of the VP).

Finally, we got him to agree to “travel advisory” and not quarantine. We wanted to announce tomorrow, but he wanted to tweet this tonight. He also said he wanted to get the Governors on board and so he wanted to call Gov Cuomo (NY), Gov Murphy (NJ), Gov. Ned Lamont (CN). And so, we adjourned to the Lincoln Study and finalized the language for the Advisory right at the Lincoln desk where the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.

I kept insisting that they do not slip and let the CDC (from whom the Advisory must come) to use their words of “DO NOT TRAVEL”. Also, I insisted through the rambling and lack of attention span that the POTUS explicitly say that this is NOT a quarantine. Finally, he individually called the 3 Governors starting off by saying “I am here with Tony and a few other people.....” Cuomo was OK but questioned to be explicit as to just what “Advisory” meant. We go it straightened out and before he went to the other Govs, he called up Sean Hannity to schmooze about TV ratings (I am not kidding). Finally, he got to the other Governors and we stopped for the night

Marc Short will work with CDC to get the right language out and the POTUS will tweet this later. I texted Cuomo saying that I had pushed back and we had avoided the quarantine. He responded: “I know that. It wasn’t his conscience. He would have made a terrible mistake for the nation. I would have had to organize the Governors to rebel. Last thing we need. Thank you....on behalf of all of us.”

WHAT A NIGHT!!!

Mar. 29, 2020 (SUNDAY) - Cases continue to soar.

BIG DAY AT WHITE House

Spent several hours with the POTUS.

Deb and I pushed hard to have the POTUS extend the 15 day guidelines for another 30 days to end of April even though Mark Meadows and Kevin Hassett were against this. They wanted to just go to 15 days extra and then re-evaluate. We pushed and said that we would leave to the POTUS.

We met with the POTUS in OVAL and Deb and I presented the case for 30 days.

He accepted that right away (he really trusts me very much). He decided that he did not want to wait three days to Tuesday to announce and so we Chaotically and quickly wrote into his speech the announcement that it would be 30 days. We had a press conference in the Rose Garden (RG) and he called several times of me and Deb to explain the rationale behind the decision. It was another of the painfully rambling press conferences that lasted on a beautiful evening the RG for 2 hours.

POTUS kept on mentioning the potential 1.5 to 2.0 million deaths in the USA due to Coronavirus, which is actually the worst case scenario of a flawed model; however, he felt that if he keeps mentioning that, then the people will take what we are saying seriously. He is incorrigible.

At the end of the day it was a good outcome since we convinced him to go with 30 day instead of ending the mitigation prematurely, which I feel would be a disaster. At the presser, I emphasized that we must pay attention to the cities/states/areas with relatively few cases since they could explode just like NYC and NOLA and other cities.

CRAZY PRESS - the fringe far-right crazies are cooking conspiracy theories that I am a Hilary Clinton mole trying to destroy Trump. See NY Times - Sunday March 29, 2020 “Chief Scientist Draw Venom From the Right” by Davey Alba and Sheera Frankel. Also, article in NY Times on “Testing Blunders....”

April 13, 2020 - Potential big problem (we shall see). NY Times reporting on an answer to a question that I gave on CNN yesterday (see above). Jake Tapper asked me if we had closed down earlier, would that have saved lives. I said it is complicated; he persisted and I said obviously, if you close earlier there would have been lives saved, but the decision was complicated. I could have answered the question better and with more clarity, but the Times is now saying that I was implying that the POTUS was to blame for additional deaths according to me.

My Note: There was not nor is there now any Scientific evidence showing lockdowns saved any lives

The far right is tweeting to fire me. The POTUS even re-tweeted the tweet that said to fire me. We shall see how the day goes.......

I called up Marc Short and explained that I was answering a hypothetical question and I told the truth. Marc was very supportive and said the POTUS was not upset and understood.

I met with VP - he called me to his office 15 minutes befor the TF meeting and we discussed this. He was terrific. I said I was angry at having been put into this position, I am completely apolitical, and I am loyal to the people that I work with. I offered to explain to the press at the daily White House press conference. Right before I walked in, I huddled with the POTUS and told him what I would do. He was very relieved and grateful saying that his right wing base is causing a lot of trouble and he was total OK with me.

I went out and explained that I was being honest in my answer to Jake, but that I was not implying that anyone was responsible for more deaths. I explained that the 2 times I recommended to the POTUS to go to ‘mitigation” (15 day, then 30 day) he took my (and Deb’s) advice and started to mitigation guidelines despite the fact that some people were pushing back (did not mention any names)

Right after that, he went on an anti-media rage showing a filiming recently put together that day by staff showing how he was on top of everything and responded swiftly. Again, repetitive stream of consciousness. I was uncomfortable sitting there.

Phone call with Jake Tapper. Jake wanted to make sure the interview did not cause me any problems.

April 14, 2020 - Press buzz still continues. Feature story in today’s Washington Post: “Despite assurances, debate over Fauci’s fate continues” by Toluse Olorunnipa, Seung Min Kim and Josh Dawsey. Also, Mike Gerson wrote an editorial in the Post attacking Trump for attacking me (re-tweet that energized Trump’s right wing fringe to attack me.

Global - 1,800,000/112,000; USA - 580,000/24,000. Daily cases starting to level off over past couple of days.

Did not do Presser today. Topic was economic. He rambled on in typical manner. He reversed himself from yesterday when he said that he has “absolute power” to tell the Governors what to do in the “re-opening”. He stunned the press with that announcement and people like Caitlin Collins pushed him on saying that since it is not true. He blew it off yesterday. Today he said that he leaves it to the Governors

It is clear after a meeting that I was called to with the VP at 10:30 AM with Deb.

Jared, Brett, and some from Jared’s team that they have salready decidedthat they will “re-open” the country on May 1 no matter what I or Deb say. Deb (as expected) is totally bought in on this. I am quite skeptical that they have a program in place to respond to a rebound. CDC certainly in incapable and Bob even even admits that his team is mor “academically oriented” as opposed to pandemic emergency oriented. Also, testing is still an issue.

April 15, 2020 - Global - 1,900,000/120,000; USA - 603,000/25,000

Print media still pitting everything I say as contradicting POTUS. They are also digging into what I said it February indicting that I said the virus would not be a problem; however, when you read my entire sentence, I said at this time (when there were a couple of cases in the USA) there is not a serious threat, but this could change very rapidly and so we need to be prepared. They leave out the last part of the sentence.

Peter Nicholas of The Atlantic (Peter Nicholas)wrote a piece saying I was humiliated and “shamed” by getting in front of the cameras and backing off the

CNN interview with Tapper. Fuck you, Peter.

Has discussion with Chris this AM (in bed) about my considering resigning from the Task Force. The CDC/FEMA, etc in my mind have no idea what they are doing. There really is no plan. Deb is secretive and worried about her job wanting to please the VP and POTUS and the press briefings are a total Shit Show with POTUS rambling. I am afraid that if I resign it will be a global explosion and might also look to my many admirers like I am deserting the cause, but this is getting very tough.

Deb Birx last night put together the plan to re-open based on a combination of the plans put forth by Tom Frieden, Scott Gottlieb, Zeke Emanuel. I edited it today with her. VP asked me to leave the TF and work with her. I edited what she had already done. It was really a done deal before she showed it to me. I emphasized that what was missing was guidelines about what to do if there is rebound. It was almost as if she had not even thought of that. She said she would do this tonight. This is really seat-of-the-pants stuff with patching together overnight a plan that has enormous implations for the health and safety of the nation. I will hang in there to help as much as I can.

April 16, 2020: Global - 2,000,000/125,000; USA - 640,000/32,000.

Today is day when newe Guidelines for re-opening will be announced.

I was shocked last night when she e-mailed me and said that all my edits had been accepted by the “Comms people”. However, they wanted to take out the part about recommending masks. I wrote back (see bold below):

Okay. Great. If we explicitly say follow CDC guidelines regarding use of masks and use during mass transit, then I cannot see how there can be any objection.

From: Birx, Deborah L. EOP/NSC <Deborah.L.Birx@nsc.eop.gov>

Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2020 9:52 PM

To: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov>

Subject: Re: WH Comms kept all of our words

Haven’t done rebound yet. Will do early am. Pushing back on mask saying follow cdc guidance and wear during mass transit.

On Apr 15, 2020, at 9:49 PM, Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov> wrote:

We should push back a bit on the masks. I think that it is important. Since when do comms people dictate public health suggestions? Walk out of the streets and people are wearing them anyway. We should be on board with them. I would be happy to do that tomorrow. We are meeting with the VP tomorrow morning. Can you arrange for you and I to meet with the relevant person so I can give it a pitch? Also, let me see the part that I did not see regarding what one does when rebound of virus occurs in the midst of a diminution of current mitigation.

Thanks, Tony

From: Birx, Deborah L. EOP/NSC <Deborah.L.Birx@nsc.eop.gov>

Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2020 9:43 PM

To: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov>

Subject: WH Comms kept all of our words

Except took out the mask in public - kept all the thresholds. What do you think? I am OK if covered in CDC guidelines I guess. Deb

In private conversation with Marc Short, I explained to him my concern about being brought into the writing of the guidelines that they wanted me to endorce, and yet I only saw them for the first time last night. Marc said that Deb told him she had run them by me and Bob Redfield. Bob said that the first time he saw them was last night. I gently confronted Deb with this and she garbled an embarrassed response.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) called my cell concerned about whether his state is ready to re-open.

His consitutuents are frightened about coming out since they realize there is no treatment and they could die from the disease.

Worked on the guidelines a bit and now got them right. POTUS, VP Deb and I presented these at the Presser. Generally well-received, everyone still fixated on the issues with testing

April 22, 2020 - Interesting day - Rick Bright has gone rogue. Due to his poor performance as head of BARDA, Alex (+/-) Kadlec removed him from his post. We (Francis and I) thought that he would stay at BARDA and spend 50% of time at NIH in order to coordinate BARDA with NIH vaccine activities,

We all had always felt that he was making bad decisions in his giving hundreds of millions of dollars to Phartma companies without any requirements to coordinate with NIH and his choices were poor to begin with. HOWEVER, in what turned out to be the most incompetent and botched HR move, they fired him by just taking his name and picture off the HHS/BARDA website without even telling him. They then assigned him to be an NIH employee under Francis taking with him from BARDA $1 Billion to work on diagnostics with Bruce Trumberg of NBIB.

Rick reacted by going public, hiring a lawyer, claiming whistleblower status and saying he was fired because he was pushing back against HHS and political pressure to fund bad science and certain companies and that he objected to pushing HC. In fact, there are e-mails and memos showing that he himself was pushing HC and giving millions to get it out there. He is an abject LIAR!

April 23, 2020 - Global - 2,500,000/170,000; USA - 827,000/47,000;

TF was uneventful. I was not at presser.....

HOWEVER, the presser was a disaster for the POTUS. All he did was fight with the press Someone from DHS presented data showing that sunlight, heat and humidity “kills’ the virus. Actually, they presented this at the TF meeting and the POTUS did not even know about it. When the DHS guy presented it, the press tore it apart as a gimmick from the POTUS.

Also, the POTUS incredibily made the comment that one should consider injecting or swallowing these disinfectants (including chlorax-like substances) as a “cure”. Deb almost fainted on stage,

Thank God I was not there,

After the presser, CNN with Erin Burnett presented a segment of the clash between the scientists (almost exclusively me) and the POTUS. They showed a point-by-point contrast of me versus the POTUS. Let us see what the reaction is tomorrow at the TF meeting.

After the presser (about 1 hour) Deb Birx texted and then called me saying it was good that I was not there since after the presser, the POTUS called her into the Oval and started yelling at her saying “You and Fauci have destroyed the country and the economy. I should never have listened to you. You have completely destroyed us.” He kept saying this over and over again and was yelling at her. I encouraged her that we are OK and at the end of the day she and I will be loved by the people we care about. She was relieved and after wrote me a text sincerely thanking me.

April 24, 2020 - Global - 2,600,000/177,000; USA - 860,000/49,000.

Press having a field day trashing the POTUS for his statement about “drinking bleach”. Consuming the press.

Will brief Governors today with the POTUS. Governor talk went well. Cuomo stated what I had been saying all along that we need a “partnership” between USG and States. Note the POTUS goes back and forth and has often said that the States are on their own and when I say “partnership” there was some concern that I was contradicting POTUS

For first time the POTUS had a presser and walked out without answering any questions. Axios wrote that he may greatly diminish pressers. He used to love them due to the “ratings” of viewers. However, his people are now telling him that it is greatly hurting his approval ratings.

April 27,2020

Great news from Emily Erbelding: The randomized placebo controlled trial of Remdesivir in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 disease has fully enrolled 1063 patients throughout the world (ACTT-1 Study). The DSMB met and indicated that remdesivir had a 31% higher rate of recovery compared to the placebo group (p < 0.001). The death rate approached significance (P=0.059).

Data sets not complete and will likely require a few mored days to tidy up.

However, the site investigators will be notified tomorrow night at 7:00 PM for ethical reasons - to make sure that those who might be on the placebo limb would have the opportunity to get Remdesivir and all other placebo-controlled trials need to consider Remdesivir as now SOC. This information will almost certainly leak and so I have decided to ask Mark Meadows if I could announce these preliminary data at a presser at the WH tomorrow (Wednesday).

April 29, 2020 - Global - 3,000,000/203,000

USA - 1,100,000/58,000;

Eventful day. Was supposed to present the Remdesivir findings at the usual 5:00 PM press conference at the WH. Marc Short called me when I was at NIH office and said to rush down to Wh since the POTUS was going to have a press availability with John Bell Edwards (Democratic Governor of Lousiana). George Adams drove me down to Wh with lights flashing and we got there in 17.5 minutes (Yikes). I present the data to multiple cameras in the Oval Office with POTUS sitting there. POTUS took me aside and said”Be enthusiastic, Tony. Be Optimistic, we need to open up the economy. It is very important”. I told him that I would tell it like it is. He nodded OK. I gave ameasure, accurate presentation. Great success.

In afternoon, HHS (with Paul Mango, Alex Azar, Bob Kadlec, Peter Marks, Bob Johnson, Francis Collins, Bruce Tromberg) presented our new vaccine strategic plan to the TF led by Deb Birx. Deb immediately tore everything apart (somewhat overly done).. Poor Peter Marks took the brunt of it. She said we should have brought in all the companies that have a track record with their platforms and guided them and funded them to go after COVID-19 instead of waiting for companies to come in themselves and ask for money. She does not like “newer technology” such as mRNA, DNA, and even some virasl vectors.

She likes antigens, whole killed, etc. A bit overdetermined in her prejudice.

However, she did have a point that btu did not fully realize that this is the problem that I have had with BARDA for years. They just give out money without coordinating anything. Very tense meeting!!

The rest of the world still pushing that we are not doing enough testing.

Clerarly a trend towards the Comms folks (Kayleaigh and Alyssa) focusing on economic re-entry and trying to hold back to POTUS from his disastrous press confererences and so the pressers are being cut back. None today; only the above Oval with Gov. Edwrads

Becoming rather friendly with Jared. Clearly, he respects me

May 14, 2020

Moncer Slaou joins the team as the “Czar” for Vaccines/Therapeutics/Diagnostics

May 15, 2020

IMPORTANT DAY AT WHITE HOUSE: Wen to White House as usual, but today was a Rose garden ceremony announcing the “Operation Warp Speed” which is the interagency plan to develop a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year and have 100 million doses by November and 300 million by Jan. 2021. This is the plan that we have been working on for some time at NIAID.

In addition, the occasion was to introduce Moncef Slaoui as the “Czar” for the project and General Gus Perna as the COO or logistic person for the supply of vaccine doses.

Important event was my meeting with the POTUS in the context of our ongoing “feud”. We (those who would be on the stage with him in the Rose Garden - Sec. Azar and Sec, Mark Esper (DoD), General Mark Milley (Chair, Joint Chiefs); Gen. Gus Perna, Francis Collins, Deb Birx) were all in the Oval waiting for the POTUS. We all had masks on. The POTUS walked in from the

Inner Office and immediately caught my eye and opend up his arms.

He gently pulled my into the outer office where the TV was on giving the economic forecast and said. “Tony, you are losing me trillions of fucking dollars.”

Then he said something interesting. He said: “Tony, you and I are OK. There is no problem between us We are similar is some respects. You are playing me and I am playing you. I know you better than you think and I respect you and like you. You need to do your thing and I need to do mine; as long as you understand tht I need to keep this country alive.” Then as we were ready to go out, he looked at all of us and said: “Do we really need to have those masks on. It sends the wrong

signal”.

I told him that we should keep them on since it would be an unforced error to take them off. The press would kill us. His response was “Who gives a shit about the press; they will try to kill us no matter what we do.” Francis and Deb looked to me and I said: “Mr. President, I will not remove the mask. I must wear it.” He had a look of exasperation on his face and said: “OK, if you insist” (Francis and Deb sighed a sigh of relief as it was clear that Deb was willing to romove the mask; Francis was with me).

However, he turned to the generals and

Azar and Esper and said: “You guys, take you masks off, you hear me?”. They dutifully did and we all walked out to theRose Garden. After the ceremony when we came back to the Oval and were about to disperse, he came over to me and said: “Tony, we are good, right?” I said: “We are good Mr. President”.

May 17,2020

What is evolving is that states that are opening thus far are not seeing an increase in cases. In fact, some are seeing decreases. We need another couple of weeks to see what is happening.

Interesting that they might be paying attention more to mask use and social distancing as they open. This is true EXECPT for the young people who are going to the bars (Milwaukee) and beaches (South Carolina,

There are 2 patterns: Acute outbreaks in nursing homes (1/3 of all dealth are in nursing homes), prisons, and meat packing plants, and industries where workers are in dormitory-like quarters.

This is easily recognizable and quickly contained.

Then there is the more subtle community spread that gradually accelerates and requires contact tracing. It is conceivable that we will progress in the next weeks with little to modest community spread and many acute outbreaks as described accounting for the spikes that we are seeing and will see.

~6:00 PM received a call from Jared Kushner. He wanted to feel me out about a few things. Primarily he wanted to get my take on Operation Warp Speed. He wanted my perspective on the structure, what it meant, my take on Moncef Slaoui.

He did not fully realize and it was good that I explained to him that the development of the COVID-19 vaccine(s), i.e. the science and implementation of trials is WHAT I DO. I asked him to make sure that when new people come in and new structures are formed that we do not “reboot” and re-invent the wheel.

We are well into the process and I just do not want any person or organization or structure get in my way. My team is the best that there is. I believe he got it.

He wanted to know how the military fits into this. It was clear during the conversation that he is the link to the POTUS and his skepticism about HHS and Azar came through. Nowhere was there mention of the VP, which aligns w what I am witnessing, i.e. the dichotomy between Jared and the POTUS versus OVP. He spoke of the role of the military in logistics and supply. I emphasized that I do not do that; I develop vaccines and do clinical trials. I punt to others to produce and distribute.

Also, it is clear that he wants to phase out the Task Force and move on the more of he various agencies of government doing their thing. He will keep Deb Birx who clearly is in his favor. It seems to me that there is a lot of “palace intrigue’ going on or about to go on. We shall see.

June 3, 2020

Had a very difficult experience today. The POTUs called my cell and screamed at me because I had mentioned to the Press (likely on a Howard Bauchner podcast or a Politico interview that the duration of immunity for common coronaviruses was 6 months to 1 year and that although we do not know the duration of vaccine immunity, it is possible that we may have to use additional boosts. Apparently the press blew this up and said that the vaccine will only protect for a very short time. The POTUS was very angry. He said I cannot keep doing this to him. He said he lover me but the country is in trouble and I am making it worse. He said the stock market only went up 600 points and it should have gone up 1000 points and so I cost the country $1 trillion. Quite a phone call.

June 15, 2020 - Global - 7,700,000/428,000 USA - 2,100,000/116,000;

.

BARDA requesting FDA to pull back the EUA for Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine, I was always against the EUA for HC and Ch since I did not believe that it fulfilled the criteria (some indication of efficacy) for an EUA: see link below. Also, this is the issue that Rick Bright has blown the whistle on, i.e. saying that he was pressured into recommending to FDA (when he was head of BARDA) to issue the EUA.

My Note: An EUA was not needed for HCQ since the drug was already licensed and doctors could prescribe it for COVID off label. The EUA made HCQ from stockpile available to hospital’s despite the fact its value lie when taken early, and not after symptoms became severe enough to be hospitalized. As such it never became available to outpatients where would have helped the most.

Furthermore, Doctors who tried to prescribe it had prescriptions were rejected by leading pharmacies because Trumps NIH Guidelines recommended against it. When Trump came down with COVID he said nothing about taking HCQ and instead opted for EUA drugs Remdesivir and Regeneron .

Call from Jeremy Berg at Pitt sending me a [paper] Cell Host & Microbe by a Chinese group Shi-Hui Sun et al: A mouse model of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and Pathogenesis. 28: 1-10, July 8, 2020 (Online first) indicating that the Chinese were making CRISPR.Cas9 knockin mice for ACE-2 that were made 30 weeks ago, which would be August, 2019 Why would they be doing that last summer???

They could have been studying SARS, but they already had mouse models. Possible they just wanted to use a better technique CRISPR) OR they knew that SARS-CoV-2 already existed and the outbreak was alread ongoing.

My Note: The timing is interesting but mouse models are used for testing Sars like coronaviruses and this model is an improved model that just happened to have been made just before Sars-Cov-2 was circulating, and subsequently used for Sars-Cov-2. The paper simply introduced the model with Sars- Cov-2 data

Something similar happened in US when RML scientist Michael Letko developed a system in 2019 that could easily test which RBD sequences could access each receptor. In January 2020 the Chinese announced they had isolated a novel coronavirus and made the genome public on January 10. Letko said he dropped everything to try to identify the receptor. Letko discovered, it could infect human cells using the same receptor that SARS uses, ACE2.

He posted a preprint online January 21 with Vincent Munster

https://archive.ph/6Tn7T

https://archive.ph/FI2LB

August 4, 2020 - Global - 18,000,000/688; USA - 4,700,000/155,000

Amazing Day - We were supposed to have a routine TF meeting today. We were waiting in the Sit Room for a 3:00 PM start and the VP was late at 3:15 PM. Marc Short then came in and said that the POTUS wanted some of us ogo to the Oval Office. We we got there, the entire senior staff was there (everyone). The VP sat the following around the Resolute Desk - me, Deb, Redfield, Giroir, Azar. The POTUS then started eyeing and throwing around the Fuck word: “What the fuck are you people doing? Deb you are saying that the pandemic is now in the rural areas. First the cities, now the rural areas. Where is it now. I am saying we have it under control and you say it is everywhere. Tony, you are always contradicting me. Giroir, you say HC does not work (he said this on SOTU on Sunday). I took it and many good doctors swear by it. The fucking message. You need to be positive”. Then he started raving that we are seeing more cases only because we are doing more testing. The other countries look good because thery are not testing. At that point, Kellyanne Conway took over and made the point that we can say what we feel is correct, but if it contradicts the pOTUS, they need to hear about it in the Oval or Sit Rooms and not hear about it for the first time on TV.

Everyone remained silent. At that point I figured enough is enough. I said: “Okay Mr.

President. We are now in the Oval Office. And so you need to hear it directly from me. Increased testing does not increase cases. When you increase testing you will of course pick up some asymptomatic cases, whom you might not notice. However when you have increased positivity and hospitalizations , and increased deaths that means that there are truly more cases. He then changed the subject and started talking about the fact that deaths are down. After I broke the ice, then Deb, Redfield, and Giroir chipped in. All in all it was a manifestation that he is desparate and still does not understand the pandemic. Very interesting encounter.

After that we went to the Doctors Huddle with Brad Smith and Adam Boehler to talk about tesing and schools. More later.

My Note: We did not have any historic positivity data at that point. Increased testing was also occurring in hospitals with patients treated for other issues and despite not having COVID symptoms they were counted as hospitalized COVID patients which meant hospitals could collect more from Medicare. Anyone dying with a positive COVID test despite dying of other reasons was then counted as a COVID death (almost 1/3 of COVID deaths died for other reasons). Also there was the issue of false positives with PCR tests at Ct<40. Anyone with CT 30 or above most likely had no replication competent virus and were not infectious or infected.

August 8,2020 - Global - 19,200,000/716,000; USA - 4,900,000/160,200.

POTUS acting even more erratically. Keeps insisting that increased case numbers are due only to increased testing, ignoring the increases in percent positive, hospitalizations and deaths (>1000/day).

Inconsistent message to me whether they want me on TV. David Muir (ABC

World News Tonight) requested me and we accepted and thought that it was cleared and then silence. Same for NBC Morning News with Savannah Guthrie.

Whether or not to open schools has been a major topic of discussion as we approach the school opening timetable. I have been saying consistent that we should have as a default position our attempt/intention to open schools because of the psychological effects on children and in some areas, the dependence on schools for breakfast and lunch. Also, the potential deleterious downstream effects on working parents.

HOWEVER, the primary consideration must be the health, safety and welfare of the children and the teachers, and the potential spreading to others (i.e. family members). I have stated that one size does not fit all and decisions should be based on the level of infection in the community:

My Note: Children and Teachers in good health were not at high risk of COVID, especially the former. And was staying at home any safer when one or more household members went to work and then went home, potentially infected due to high levels of community spread prompting school closures. The logic is faulty

August 11, 2020 - Global USA

Very serious e-mail from Deb Birx this AM and my response to her:

Deb:

I am totally with you. I will, and I trust we all will, continue to give the message that we have been giving. This is an historic pandemic and it is our responsibility to do everything we can to contain, control and eliminate it. We cannot just let the virus do its thing since people will die. Children get infected and some of them get very sick and they almost certainly play a role in the community spread. We should hold strong on this. Perhaps we can still be value-added, but we need to discuss that if the POTUS is following Atlas’s advice and not ours, then what are we doing there?

My Note: Mr Science provides no statistical data just generalizations

Important meeting at Task Force - Trump has brought in a Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiation oncologist from Stanford Hoover Institute. He is a FOX News Commentator and Trump has seen him on FOX. He is against everything we are saying. He wants to open schools in red Zone, feels that children do not get sick (or even transmit when they get infected) and so we should let herd immunity form. He wants to protect the vulnerable but does not realize that we do no do that effectively. He wants to only test symptomatic people. He obviously does not believe in community spread. This is going to be a real problem. The rightwing press is saying that Trup brought him in to counter me and Birx. Atlas now has an office in the EEOB and he is Special Assistant to the POTUS. He is also now a member of the Task Force.

August 14, 2020 - Excess death calculations has us actually at 200,000 deaths from COVID-19.Global USA

Did Task Force today. Had brief discussion with Scott Atlas. He is concerned about being seen as the “anti-Fauci”. He says that he is not in favor of “let it rip” to develop herd immunity. He believes in herd immunity, but he feels that we should just protect the elderly and vulnerable in nursing homes. He may be backing off on what he was “supposed” to have said. Clearly, Deb Birx and to some extent Redfield feel that he is dangerous. He might be, but I really need to hear from him what is position is on a variety of subjects.

My Note: And how many of those excess deaths were lockdown related. We already know at least 1/3 of those reported COVID deaths were not COVID. So 115,000 COVID deaths despite lockdowns on top of 85,000 non-Covid Excess deaths caused by lockdowns and other mitigation measures. 1/3 of those 115,000 COVID deaths were in nursing homes meaning Community COVID deaths were 76,000

August 18, 2020 - Global - 22,000,000/773,000; USA - 5,400,000/170,000

I continue to be kept out of the classic press but am getting in through indirect ways. Still have >1000 deaths per day. Scott Atlas now the main person that Trump listens to. I have reached out to Scott to give him a fair chance to explain to me exactly how he feels about children getting infected and the issues with letting community spread happen. We obviously differ here. He and White House feel that we can let children get infected in schools since they do not get sick and we just need to protect the vulnerable in Nursing Homes. Fallacious thinking since there are many not in Nursing Homes who are vulnerable such as obese people, diabetics, hypertensives, etc.

ALSO, many reports coming out now about long term cardiovascular and brain effects in younger people who were not even sick enough to go to the hospital, and who were merely home in bed for a couple of weeks. ALSO, more younger people dying.

Of note, I was the only one of the Doctors in the TF who was noit invited to be present in the Sit Room for the Governors’s call today.

My Note: Wow, we knew long term effects after less than 5 months. Maybe being lockdown eating twinkies and drinking beer and being scared death by folks like Fauci and socially isolated is bad for your cardiovascular and mental health. Duh

August 26, 2020 - Global USA

• POTUS holding more briefings with Scott Atlas and others (Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Cody Meissner) to the exclusion of Deb Birx. Making it very awkward for her. I have been out of the briefing loop for some time now.

August 31, 2020 - Global USA

Trump stoking violence (racial tensions) in Kenosha, WI and Portland, OR

QAnon misrepresenting data from CDC that says that about 9000 out of the >180,000 deaths reported for COVID-19 had only COVID-19 on the death certificate. The remainder also had other underlying conditions. QAnon is saying that all the other deaths had nothing to do with COVID-19. The POTUS loves this and is tweeting that Fauci and Birx shut down the country for only 9000 deaths. What an idiot!!

September 13, 2020

Important Day!! - POTUS called me up at around 11:20 AM (Sunday) and started a diatribe about my interview on Friday with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.

He went on and on about how negative I was on the show. He said that I was great on Thursday with John Roberts (FOX) and so “what happened” to make me negative. I tried to explain to him that the entire message was not all negative. was really saying that there is a risk with the upticks in ND, SD, MT and other states for a surge if we do not intensify the public health measures of masks, distance, crowds, etc.

I emphasized that what I was saying is that we can control this without having to shut down. As soon as I mentioned the word “shut down” he went off saying we will never again shut down as if I was suggesting that we would when I was saying just the opposite. He then went off on asking about vaccines and saying that I should take credit for success instead emphasizing failures. It really was stream of consciousness. We ended the call on a friendly note, but it was clear that he did not want me to do this anymore. He mentioned whether or not I like Trump, I should not do this. I told him that I do not dislike him and he knows that. He agreed. I will either have to stay off TV or continue to disappoint him since I cannot change my message.

September 26, 2020 -

Major conflict between Deb and Atlas. See below with Deb’s daily report.

Atlas says that we do not need to test for asymptomatics since the only thing that counts is preventing vulnerable people from dying. He does not see the connection between asymptomatic young people (without hospitalization and deaths rising → older and vulnerable (with later hospitalization and deaths rising). We are heading to a major clash between deb/me/Bob versus Atlas

September 29, 2020 - Global - 33,200,000/1,000,000; USA - 7,100,000/205,000

1st Presidential Debate tonight. Horrible “shit show”. Trump was embarrassing, continually interrupting Biden, bullying all the way, making no sense, lying. Moderator Chris Wallace could not control him. Trump refused to denounce White Supremacists and when asked about the “Proud Boys”, Trump said” “Stand down, stand by” essentially endorsing them. Alos, he misquoted me saying that I am against masks. He also said that I praised him for saving lives by shutting down China travel. Reporters (Chris Cuomo, Jim Sciutto, Maggie Fox, etc) continually texting me during the debate wanting me to counter what he said about me and masks

October 7, 2020 - Global USA

Alex Azar met yesterday with Atlas and his 3 stooges - Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Martin Kulldorff’s (Harvard). Seems that he is buying into Atlas

October 9, 2020 - Global USA

We are clearly seeing resurgences in various parts of USA, esp. the upper mid-west and the Northwest (see below). This is exactly what we (Deb and I) predicted would happen if young people did not abide by public health recommendations (masks, crowds, etc). It also validates my insisting to the VP that although I did not like being the “skunk at the picnic”, the upticks in case positivity clearly predicted the increase incases → hospitalizations → deaths.

Also, shows that Atlas and his 3 stooges are completely incorrect.

October 29, 2020 - Global - 44,000,000/1,200,000; USA - 8,800,000/227,000

POTUS in complete denial that there is a raging pandemic and everything is spiking. He keeps insisting that we have “turned the corner” or “rounding the turn”

Some potentially nefarious stuff going on. The FDA career scientists are hesitant to grant EUAs to Lilly’s and Regeneron’s mAb based on the current data.

Alex Azar is really pushing them and furious because he thinks FDA is “slow-walking” the process so as not to have it out before the election in 5 days. Clearly, Alex wants to please the POTUS so that they can say that they have a breakthrough (similar to Convalescent plasma nonsense) right before the election. Azar then asked NIH (Collins), CDC (Redfield) and ASPR (Kadlec) to weigh in since the legislation that established the EUA process (dating back to the Anthrax situation in 2001) requires the CDC, NIH, and ASPR Directors to weigh in on EUA decisions (even though they have not done so in the past). Cliff and I had long conversation with Francis on his way down to HHS to discuss with Azar.

November 11, 2020 - Global USA

Steady surges continue with 10 days in a row of> 100,000 cases/day.

Trump fired Sec Mark Esper and several DoD civilian officials (high ranking) have resigned. Fear is that Trump is stacking the DoD with loyalists if he really wants to do a coup and steal the election/democratic process. Very scary times. The GOP leadership that are backing Trump (McConnell, McCarthy, Jordan, Blount) are incredibly shameful. Reminds me historically of Hitler getting duly elected to Chancellorship and then forcibly taking over the country. Amazing!!

November 13, 2020 - Global - USA -

Pandemic surge continues. Curve is exponential

Moving along with the deployment of vaccine, Pfizer is putting in for their EUA.

There should be 20 million doses of vaccine ready to deploy in December.

Moderna will be doing the initial examination of data within days and likely will have comparable efficacy data to Pfizer. Their will have 15 million doses for

deployment in December. Thus, 20 + 15 = 40 million doses for 15 - 20 million people in December. Aim to is get nursing homes (NH) covered quickly. 1.5 million people in NHs + 1.5 million staff = 3 million people (6 million doses)

November 16, 2020 - Global - 54,300,000/1,300,000; USA -

11,000,000/246,000

Continual surge: 138,000 new infections yesterday. POTUS has no interest at all in the Pandemic. He is focusing on blocking Biden from being POTUS. He is embarrassing the USA. However, 72,000,000 voted for him. Difficult to understand. Craziness has overtaken part of our country (1/2).

Jared Kushner did call me up right before the press briefing related to the Moderna vaccine announcement

December 25, 2020 - Global - 78,00,000/1,700,000; USA - 18,600,000/328,000

Trump at Mar-a Largo while country in crisis. Cases still surging in certain areas (see below). Relief bill in purgatory since he does not want to sign it because of disagreement about amount of relief ($600 versus $2000). Everyone had agreed to $600 even though the Dems wanted more. White House staff agreed to the bill. Sent to Trump for signature, except that now that he has finally looked at it, he wants the $2000 per person, which is what the Dems wanted to begin with, and the GOP objected to. And so now, he is bucking against his own GOP.

In the meantime, people are starving without aid. Also, the USG might shut down since the Omnibus budget bill has not been signed either. Amidst all this, Trump is pardoning a large number of people (>40), almost all who were involved in the issues surrounding the probe of him and the impeachment matters. He also pardoned Gen. Flynn, Roger Stone, and Charle Kushner.

January 5, 2021

Trump going completely crazy. Was recorded on an hour-long telephone call with Secretary of State of Georgia Brad Raffensperger to change the votes and asked for 11, 780 votes to be changed (he lost Georgia by 11,779). Clearly a criminal act of trying to influence an election.

More cowardly GOPs are backing Trump in the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate (Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO)

January 7, 2021 - Global - 85,500,000/1,900,000; USA - 21,300,000/360,000

Record number of deaths yesterday - >3963. Today another record at 4000. Surging continues.

Slow start in the implementation of administration of vaccines. Was supposed to have 20 million doses distributed and administered by December 31. Today there have been 15 million distributed and 5 million administered.

January 8, 2021 - Global USA

4111 Deaths!! Record hospitalizations.

My Note: they are vaccinating 300,000- 500,000 mostly elderly per day, how many of these 40000+ deaths are due to the vaccines and being called COVID?

I have been on the phone with Jeff Zients a few times today. I checked the number for rojected requirement of vaccines to fulfill the promise of 100 million doses in arms in 1st 100 days of Biden administration. The number in the Biden slides (Kessler derived) was 275 million doses and 135 million people (getting 2 doses) by end of April. I called Moncef Slaoui and got the actual numbers and they totaled 189 million. I called Jeff and let him know.

He checked with Kessler who then checked with Moncef and they figures that the doses that had already been allocated prior but not given yet would make up for the difference. I am concerned that we (Biden team) will not meet the promise. Too many vicissitudes in vaccine production. Perhaps Janssen will bale us out with the 25 million doses in March and 40 million in April (single dose required). Then, Biden team announced that they would not hold back any doses to save for 2nd shot, but will immunize everyone then can with doses they have. This places a lot of faith in the precision of the production/delivery of doses. They may have to pause with 1st doses to catch up with 2nd dose requirement.

January 9, 2021 - Global - 87,600,000/1,900,000; USA - 22,000,000/368,000

The pandemic is getting more scary. Every day more and more cases and deaths. Patients in the hallways in California. Nurses and MDs exhausted. It seems that people are getting infected who are being careful and have no idea why they are getting infected. N501Y mutation is here in the USA, but it is not dominant. We may actually have our own mutant that we have not recognized since the CDC has not really been looking.

January 10, 2021 - Global - 88,400,000/1,900,000 USA - 22,100,000/371,100

And the surge goes on..... There is a real concern that we have our own mutant that is resulting n an increased surge in cases.

People are saying they have no idea how they got infected since they have been observing public health recommendations.

January 13, 2021 - Global - 90,100,000/1,900,000; USA - 22,700,000/379,000

The surge continues. Could this be that we are dealing with our own highly contagious variant, but we do not realize it since the CDC sequencing surveillance has not been very comprehensive as has the UK surveillance?

My Note: Would not vaccinating in the middle of a pandemic with a high prevalence of virus in circulation not drive viral evolution and variants

January 20, 2021

Inauguration Day! Trump refusing to attend inauguration and left with a flare that was very sparsely attended. Biden was at Mass as Trump flew off to Mar-a-Largo. Trump’s speech was surrealistic talking about all the great accomplishments of his Presidency. He also strongly hinted that he will be back with a “movement”. He is a very dangerous man!!

I am preparing for my early AM speech to WHO Executive Board tomorrow. Beth Cameron has given me much leeway on the Speech (which her staff put together).

Mutants of SARS-CoV-2 getting much play in the scientific “preprint” arena. Final papers will soon come out. We will put restrictions (requirement for pre - and post - flight testing + quarantine) from RSA.

Will brief POTUS Biden tomorrow.

Am still quite achy from vaccine booster shot from yesterday.

January 25, 2021 - Global - 99,000,000/2,100,000; USA - 25,000,000/418,000

• Did really good WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM Panel chaired by John Mickethwait (Bloomberg) with panelists: Prime Minister of Greece Kyriakos Mitsotakis; Nancy Brown (CEO of American Heart Association) and Frans van Houten (CEO of Royal
  Philips)

• The vaccine is now being referred to as the “Fauci Ouchie”

January 27, 2021 - Global USA

Really good relations developing with the WH Comms team led by Jen Psaki and particularly Courtney Rowe. Dramatic difference from Trump WH Comms

January 26, 2021 - Global - 99,000,000/2,100,000; USA - 25,200,000/420,000

VP Harris visited NIH for her booster shot with Husband Greg Emhoff. She and I did a PSA together.

Had moving conversation with Moncef Slaoui who felt that the Biden people were discrediting and bad-mouthing OWS that Moncef led. In fact, Moncef did a fabulous job in getting 2 vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer) approved (EUA) that are highly efficacious with other candidates (Janssen, AZ, Novavax) not far behind. He feels badly for the OWS team and for himself. I told him that he has done a fabulous and historic job in what he accomplished. I told him that to me and many others, he is a hero. He was very touched by the conversation.

February 21, 2021 - Global - 110,700,000/2,500,000; USA - 27,900,000/499,000

Matt Pottinger’s interview with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. Good summary of history of the early months: https://cbsn.ws/3pGH9tR

Excerpt from interview

MARGARET BRENNAN: Let’s unpack some of what you were saying about the response here at home. It’s- it’s been widely reported that you went into the Oval Office alongside National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and told President Trump at the end of January that this would be the greatest national security threat that he ever faced. Did he understand the gravity of what you were saying at that time?

POTTINGER: I think he did. That was something that Robert O’Brien told the president. To the president’s credit, he decided to shut down travel from China.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Around that same time, though, the American public is being told that this is not a direct threat to them. Robert O’Brien was on FACE THE NATION saying exactly that:

ROBERT O’BRIEN FTN 2/2/20: Right now, there’s- there’s no reason for Americans to panic. This is something that is low risk, we think, in the U.S.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Is that what you thought at the time?

POTTINGER: I thought that it was going to be potentially quite- quite devastating. You could match that against quotes from- from a great number of public health experts in this country and abroad who were saying similar things because we did not have hard evidence from the Chinese government that this thing was- was as dangerous as it was. So my view was, let’s prepare for the worst.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So in preparing for the worst inside the National Security Council, you started telling your staffers to wear masks. Yet the American public wasn’t told definitively by the CDC to wear masks until April, why?

POTTINGER: Remember, we misjudged the nature of this thing to think that it was like flu, one of the mistakes that followed on from that was the misjudgment by public health officials in this country to- to not advocate for the widespread generalized use of face coverings, cloth masks, surgical masks and what have you. That was, they feared shortages, rightly. We’d put all of our mask making supply chains into, guess where, China. And China was not making it easy for us to get access to- to additional supplies. So the CDC, that was an understandable thing to do. But it then made the mistake of conflating that with a- a set of advice that masks don’t work effectively for the general public.

That was a big mistake. Robert O’Brien and I weren’t really willing to wait. And so we thought that the risk of a outbreak in the White House could be potentially devastating for the United States. It would- it would- that would create a national security risk. And so in early April, we started looking for supplies of masks. I ended up calling a foreign government. I called some senior officials in Taiwan just to- just to ask for lessons learned. Taiwan had done better than probably any other country in the world at containing this- this virus. And so in the course of my conversation, I asked whether they had masks available. They agreed to send a shipment of half a million masks just a couple of days later.

We put those masks into the national stockpile so they’d be available to frontline medical workers. I made sure that one box got delivered to the White House and was disseminated through the NSC and- and the White House medical unit.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So you knew enough to call a foreign government to ask for masks, but the American public wasn’t being told yet to wear them and the president wasn’t wearing them. How do you make sense of that?

POTTINGER: Yeah, it’s frustrating. The- the mask misstep cost us dearly. It was the one tool that was widely available, at least homemade, you know, cotton masks were widely available. It was the one effective, widely available tool that we had in the arsenal to- to deal with this. But public health officials were stuck in this sort of flu mentality. It- it was- it was a- it was a grave misstep. The other really grave misstep, and this is the one that I think we haven’t rectified yet, and we’ve got to rectify it. It has to do with the collection and analysis of critical data about how this virus is spreading in real time, so that we can stay ahead of it, ensure that- that we don’t get sucker punched by a new variant that could compromise the effectiveness of our- of our vaccine. And this is an area where the Centers for Disease Control has stumbled very, very badly. I know that the new director, Dr. Walensky, is- is working hard on trying to get- get a far greater number of samples of this virus genetically sequenced, which is critical. We- everyone should give as much support to her in that endeavor as possible. But there are cultural and organ- organizational problems that still need to be rectified at the CDC. If we’re- if we’re going to have a chance at success, both in bottling up this pandemic and also preventing the next one.

POTTINGER: Bob Redfield did the very best that he could with what he had. I’m talking about institutionally in the- in the belly of this institution, the CDC was unwilling to- to partner with industrial labs to do tens of thousands of sequences so- so that you could actually see where this thing was going. They wanted to do it internally.

And- and I think the reason for that is they want the data themselves so that they can publish. There’s a very powerful incentive within CDC culture to partner with academic institutions rather than private institutions and- and to collect data, submit for peer review articles that burnish your credentials. That’s a very slow process. That’s not the- the kind of incentive you want for dealing with a fast moving pandemic.

MARGARET BRENNAN: How much of this is a question of if this should be handled by public health officials at all, or whether a pandemic should be handed over to intelligence officials and handled like a national security threat?

POTTINGER: The intelligence community does need to prioritize the collection of intelligence on these kinds of bio threats rather than relying strictly on- on sister-to-sister relationships between our CDC and public health officials in other countries. But I don’t think that the intelligence community is going to be able to do more than that critical role of collecting and analyzing the information.

MARGARET BRENNAN: You’re clearly thinking a lot of what could have been done differently. Do you think that the Trump administration did the best it could?

POTTINGER: We had an impeachment, the first impeachment trial taking place as the coronavirus task force was meeting at a time when the country wasn’t focused on- on this pandemic. People in the White House were. People at Health and Human Services and at the CDC were. I- I never encountered anyone at a senior level who was not deeply seized by the- the major weight of what we were facing. I do think that people did their best.

I’m doing this Hot Wash, as I call it, in the- in the spirit of trying to help understand that the narrative that it was all political failures at the top is not true. And so what I’m trying to- to bring to light here is that we have a deeper problem with the permanent government in how we are organized culturally and- and organizationally to deal with this pandemic and with future ones. I want us to succeed at getting better.

March 24, 2021 - Global -123,900,000/2,700,000; USA - 29,800,000/541,300

• Moncef Slaoui fired from GSK Board of Directors for sexual harassment charges dating back a few years

April 20,2021

• I was on the governor’s call today. One of the questions that came up today was why we still have a mask mandate for outdoors. I agree that this is a problem. Rochelle answered that CDC is re-examining this issue. I feel that we should obviously say that if a person is out alone outside, they do not need to wear a mask

May 24, 2021

Appropriations Hearing (Senate and House) coming up next week. Interesting to see if they fixate on the lab. Escape theory. I had a very interesting and helpful conversation today with Christian Andersen of Scripps Research Institute. He was very emphatic that the work that was done at the Wu Han Institute in Association with our grant was not gain of function . In addition he confirmed that if you match the chimeric viruses that were made in the context of the NIH grant in Wuhan, they are not even close sequence wise to the SARS-CoV-2. Christian will be writing a letter together with some data on this topic; however, I feel much better now that he is in total support of what I have been saying.

June 4, 2021

Very important and very strange briefing of me by the CIA in the NIH SCIF this afternoon (5:00 PM). I received an extremely strange an unexpected briefing today by the CIA related to the origin of the virus. Beth Cameron from NSC was listening in on one of the other screens.

And as it turns out she was as baffled as I was by the briefing. It was very similar to some of the very disappointing briefings that I had previously received in prior years from the CIA.

A young woman whose name was Camille Hartman gave most of the briefing. She was accompanied by what was probably the senior male CIA person and another young woman. Camille in my mind was almost pathetic in her naivety an obvious lack of appreciation of any of the science of what she was talking about.

She gave instances of things that she said were gotten by CIA intercepts of conversations in China, particularly in Wuhan. her major point was that she feels but the Chinese have not been transparent about what was going on in their labs since there were no reports publicly of what they found out from intercepts. This included the transfer of Pangolin viruses from a group in Beijing two Wu Han. They felt that this was being used in a study using transgenic mice. I have no idea why this was any great concern to them since it would be perfectly natural for a lab that studies coronavirus to look at Pangolins. In addition, she spoke about the observation that WIV was sampling Pangolins and several members of WIV took a trip to obtain Pangolins.

They also spoke about the fact that they have information from sources that unknown experiments were conducted by the military in Wu Han. The thing that blew me away about how naive and uninformed they are was the fact that they mentioned that they had word that in July of 2020 there was a super spreading event in China related to passage of virus in the laboratory. This astounded Beth and I for the same reason. Why would they suspect that a super spreading event that occur in the middle of a major outbreak in China was related to the passage of virus in the laboratory?

The naivete of the briefing stunned both Beth and me. Also, in the matter in which she was asking me questions almost made me believe she was grilling me prompting me to say somewhat tongue in cheek whether I should have a lawyer with me. I got on the phone with Beth immediately after the briefing and she was very upset saying that she was going to check up the chain who and why this briefing was called and why there was no forwarding material to prepare us for what they were doing. There is something very fishy about all of this.

My Note: Nothing Fishy. Smart criminals like to create patsies who will be suspected of doing the crime they committed. That said Fauci’s reaction seemed a bit over the top and had me thinking “Doth protest too much”. Surely a government funded lab in China that worked with coronaviruses would be interested in Pangolins and work with the military on some projects. Heck, even our military works with non-military labs as seen with DARPA PREEMPT

June 20, 2021 - Global USA

Uneventful and somewhat relaxing day . Still trying to process the news from yesterday. Will have to live with uncertainty for the next three months.

As indicated above, Francis Collins organized a zoom call for today with a group of evolutionary biologists as well as Steve Sherry from the NIH databank in order to discuss this issue. Jesse bloom was also on the call. See email below from Francis having organized the meeting:

From: Collins, Francis (NIH/OD) [E] <collinsf@od.nih.gov>

Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2021 2:33 PM

To: Tabak, Lawrence (NIH/OD) [E] < lawrence.tabak@nih.gov>; Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov>; Embry, Alan (NIH/NIAID) [E] <embrya@niaid.nih.gov>; Sherry, Steve (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [E] <sherry@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov>

Cc: Kristian G. Andersen <kga1978@gmail.com>; Bedford, Trevor <tbedford@fredhutch.org›; Bloom PhD, Jesse D <jbloom@fredhutch.org>; Garry, Robert F <rfgarry@TULANE.EDU>; rasmus_nielsen@berkeley.edu; spond@temple.edu

Subject: RE: URGENT: Seeking your expert advice

Allow me to suggest this agenda:

1. Introductions

2. Retrieval of SARS-CoV-2 reads deleted from SRA by submitter - Jesse Bloom

3. NCBI SOPs for handling submitter requests to delete reads in SRA - Steve Sherry

4. Likelihood of other sequence deletions from SRA? - Steve Sherry

5. Significance of this new sequence information for origin of SARS-CoV-2 - Jesse, Kristian,
   Trevor, Bob, Rasmus, Sergei

6. Discussion and next steps -

AllLooking forward to the discussion. Done Francis Please see the people copied on the above email for a list of those who were present at the zoom call. The only person on the list who was not there was Trevor Bedford who could not make the zoom connection. After considerable discussion among the group, it became clear that Jesse Bloom had really jumped the gun and made assumptions that the Chinese were surreptitiously hiding sequences by deleting them. Several of the scientists including Sergei Pond and Rasmus Nielsen felt that the sequences that were deleted and ultimately recovered

partially were not of any particular consequence in shedding any light on the origin of SARS Co V2. The entire group felt that this was an inappropriate move on the part of Jesse to publish a single author paper making serious innuendos without running it by anyone else. As it turns out after discussion with Steve Sherry who is in charge of the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA) from which the sequences were deleted, it became clear that this is not an unusual occurrence for scientists to delete sequences if they are found to be either inaccurate, not up to date, or listed on another databank. He went back and looked at the required email to have the Wuhan sequences deleted, and the Chinese had indicated that they were removing it because they were putting it on their own separate database. According to Steve this would be a perfectly valid reason to remove a sequence. This obviously is going to cause us a lot of difficulty since those who feel that the Chinese are trying to cover up a lab leak will certainly say that this deletion of sequences proves that that is the case.

It is really a shame that Jesse acted really in my opinion somewhat immaturely in making inflammatory statements in a preprint without further investigating the reasons behind the deletions.

The NIH came out with the following statement in response to press inquiries regarding the Bloom preprint:

NIH is aware of Dr. Bloom’s preprint submission. Staff at the National Library of Medicine, which hosts the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), have reviewed the submitting investigator’s request to withdraw the data. These SARS-CoV-2 sequences were submitted for posting in SRA in March 2020 and subsequently requested to be withdrawn by the submitting investigator in June 2020. The requestor indicated the sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to another database, and wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid version control issues. The submitting investigator published relevant

information about these sequences by preprint in March, 2020 and in a journal in June, 2020.

Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data.

Currently, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has no plans to change the policy that recognizes submitters rights to their own data and the right to petition that their data be withdrawn from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA). The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the NLM that manages the database, is the U.S. participating member of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, which provides guidelines for withdrawing data:

http://www.insdc.org/documents/insdc-status-document.

NLM/NCBI can’t speculate on motive beyond a submitter’s stated intentions.

June 19, 2021 - Global USA

Horrible roller coaster day - Due to some acute transient right posterior chest pain 2 days ago, Ted Li order a CT scan. - I got a call from the radiologist at Sibley hospital where I had gotten a chest CT in the morning telling me that I had a lesion in my right lower lobe that he felt was a cancer (non-small cell carcinoma). I felt like I got hit like by a Mack truck. Doctor Li quickly followed up on this and show the film to Andrew Lerner at Sibley who is a pulmonologist specializing in pulmonary nodules. Doctor Lerner felt that it was more likely an inflammatory lesion and there were multiple other lesions that were very small throughout the right lower lobe. In addition, I had a pulmonary infarct in the right lowest segment that was definite. Again, Dr. Li called David Hellmann Who was with his son who is an oncologist who looked at it and said that it looks more benign then neoplastic and felt that it did not look like a non-small cell carcinoma. Finally, they showed the films via computer to Dr. Elliot Fishman who is the top radiologist at Hopkins. He agreed that it was more likely inflammatory and that the only definite thing on the film was the pulmonary infarct. He recommended a follow-up CT in three months and begin anticoagulation immediately with Eliquis.

July 7, 2021

I had a very important meeting today with the NSC led by Beth Cameron and Maher Bitar who is the senior director for intelligence programs at NSC. We met in the EEOB SCIF and discussed the briefing document that the NSC had presented to the President a week or so ago.

Beth wanted me to have an official briefing because of the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the CIA gave me several weeks ago. There were no new surprises for me in the briefing except that it became clear that the FBI has no idea what they’re talking about since they are convinced that the origin of COVID-19 is from a laboratory leak. The reasons that they give do not make any sense. In contrast the NSA gave some reasonable hypotheses leaning heavily towards a natural jump of species in the environment.

I spent some time explaining to Maher and Beth my own theories that the Chinese act like they’re covering up something even when they have nothing to cover up. They manifested this in their response to the original SARS-CoV-1 when they insisted this was just an atypical influenza when in fact it was the beginning of a coronavirus pandemic

In addition, they likely shot themselves in the foot when they denied the presence of wild animals in the market when we know they were present and the Chinese cleaned out the market before adequate testing of animals could occur.

In essence, they clouded the possibility of proving a natural emergence.

I urged the NSC folks to work closely with qualified card-carrying evolutionary virologists such as Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, Andy Rambaut, among others. I also explained to them the multiple reasons epidemiologically and molecularly why it is almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though I emphasized that I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak.

However, in this regard, I emphasized that just because two alternatives are possible that does not mean that they are equally probable. I believe that they understood where I was coming from and that it turned out to be a very good meeting.

My Note: One of the great mysteries. Why would China not want to prove natural emergence?. Perhaps this would make them look responsible, but would it be any worse than people think they engineered the virus and accidentally released it. Of course not. Of course in China people prefer to think it was a bioweapon released by the US which boomeranged and caused the US and West more harm.

Truth is Chinas leadership does not care what anyone thinks. Its not like they can be voted out of office and their importance economically means they are pretty much untouchable. The US right prefers to push the Chinese lab leak since this supports their anti-China rhetoric, while the left pushes natural origin to protect “Science”.

As I pointed out many times Operation COVID was likely a collaboration between the US, West and China to facilitate the end of Democracy and accelerate Global Techno-Fascism (China is not Communist its Fascist). The US provided the virus, and China provided the Psyop Theater in the early stages and allowed the release on Wuhan after verifying the benign quality of the virus to young and healthy people. The early lockdown in China whose effectiveness was proven with fake Chinese data provided the Public Health Techno Fascists in the West the excuse to lock us down and administer the deadly Operation Warp Speed Vaccines. The rest is history. I provided more details elsewhere

The debate over natural origin and accidental lab leak prevent people from considering a larger conspiracy involving deliberate release of either a natural or engineered virus. Fauci and Daszak are convenient scapegoats which is not to say they were not part of the conspiracy

July 8, 2021 -

Kristian Andersen, Bob Garry and many others came out yesterday with on a preprint server a paper strongly arguing with good evidence for a natural emergence of SARS-CoV-2 rather thsan a lab leak: The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review https://bit.ly/3jSK1Ep

CNN: “Coronavirus almost certainly came from an animal, not a lab leak, top scientists argue”

July 18,2021

Cases continue to increase. The question that is being asked is whether fully vaccinated people who have breakthrough infections can transmit the infection to others. Still no direct data either way

July 19, 2021

Jeff Z. called me early this AM (6:45 AM) concerned about the breakthrough infections of vaccinated people and waned my opinion about moving towards masking of vaccinated people who are in hot zones. I think that we should.

Jeff called again at 10:00 AM concerned about the time FDA is taking to grant a full BLA for the vaccines. He is acutely aware of the sensitivity of not interfering with or pressuring the FDA, but we need the BLA since many people are not getting vaccinated until the vaccines are

“fully approved”.

Also, Jeff want me to get firm information on how long it will take for the peds (11 years old and younger) approval to come.

Stock Market plunging >700 down due to concerns about the spread of the Delta variant.

Mayor Bill Di Blasio called and ask my opinion about a strategy that he would like to do to try and get more people vaccinated and safe from the delta variant. He is proposing to give the people of New York City two alternatives if they are not vaccinated: 1) get vaccinated or 2) be required to get tested with a nasal swab at least once a week. The mayor feels that people will likely get tired of getting tested every week and my opt to get vaccinated purely for the convenience of it. Even though the requirement for a nasal swab is indeed a mandate, the mayor feels that this is much less intrusive they mandate for a vaccine.

Note: This is remarkably similar to the OSHA Mandates that would be proposed in September (Fauci never mentioned it)

July 26, 2021

Important stuff going on!! We had at least two zoom meetings today with Jeff, Rochelle, Vivek, and Bechara to discuss the upcoming change in masking guidelines that the CDC will be proposing. It relates to the fact that data or showing that the level of virus in the nasopharynx of vaccinated people with asymptomatic breakthrough infections is similar according to CT values to that in individuals who are infected asymptomatically and who have not been vaccinated.

These data are strongly suggestive that individuals who are vaccinated and who get infected can’t transmit the virus to others as easily as an unvaccinated people. This is triggering the need to tell vaccinated people that when they go to situations that are indoors that now they have to wear a mask or should at least seriously consider wearing a mask depending on the level of infection in the community where they are living.

Rochelle is really having a very tough time in negotiating this with Jeff in the context of “her team” at CDC that seems to be operating in their usual manner independently of running things by the White House. For example at the end of a long and tortuous discussion about getting the wording correct in the new guideline, Rochelle let us know that two days from now (Wednesday) the CDC will be coming out with an MMWR that will overlap with what we have been wordsmithing for the guideline. Jeff and everyone else was blown away that these two parallel things were going on and we did not even know about it. I feel badly for Rochelle since she is dealing with an ingrained CDC system that has been that wayfor the decades that I have been dealing with them. Jeff and the White House Comms people (Courtney Rowe) are very concerned about mixed messaging. We decided that we would sleep on this and address it again in the morning.

Done

July 27, 2021 - Global - 194,600,000/4,200,000; USA - 34,500,000/609,000

Just got a call from Jeff that he wants me to brief the President today about the issues discussed above. It is very clear and unfortunate that confidence in Rochelle is very low within the White House team of Jeff, Courtney Rowe, and others. STAY TUNED

August 2, 2021 - Global USA

I briefed the President today in the Oval Office. It was part of the weekly briefing that we do where Rochelle and Vivek and Marcella were on the zoom screen and I was in the office with the President and the Vice President. I briefed him on the efficacy of the vaccine against the delta variant as well as on the issue of breakthrough infections and the possibility of our need for boosters.

The President was his usual pleasant and calm self; however, he seemed a bit troubled about two issues: first, he is aware that everyone is waiting for the FDA to give final approval to the vaccines and that this would go a long way to getting more people vaccinated. He clearly does not want to interfere with the FDA; however, he is growing impatient with the length of time that is taking for them to come across with a full approval.

Second, he is concerned about the fact that the moratorium on evictions of people from their homes has expired and the Supreme Court has voted five to four that the moratorium cannot be extended. He has the power to call together constitutional scholars and claim that they have given him enough reason to overrule the opinion of the Supreme Court and order the CDC to continue with the moratorium on evictions. He is hesitant to do that since although he believes it is the right thing to do from a humanitarian standpoint, he does not want to set a precedent for a President to use his or her Presidential authority to overrule a Supreme Court ruling. He is afraid that if we get another President similar to Trump, that a lot of mischief and bad acting could occur if such a precedent were set. And so, he has to live with the uncomfortable situation of Nancy Pelosi essentially yelling at him on the phone to do something about the eviction situation when in some respects he is powerless to do so. I feel for him and I am more appreciative close and personal of the weight of the Presidency.

As it turns out, the President did get an opinion from some constitutional scholars and made the decision to ask the CDC to extend the moratorium for 30 days. As Ron Klain said in the White House, it is likely that the courts will overturn this extended moratorium pretty quickly. We shall see. The general spin is that the president did this because of extensive pressure from Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress.

Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut called me today in frustration that the FDA has not yet given full BLA approval to the COVID-19 vaccines. He asked if I could do anything about it . I explained to him that that would be difficult since it would suggest that we are putting pressure on the FDA which could backfire on us. I told him that I was very much in favor of accelerating the process and that I felt that the approval would likely come within the next couple of weeks.

He also asked about booster shots and I explained to him that boosters for the immunocompromised would likely come very soon and that it would probably take a couple of months before there was enough data to recommend booster shots for the elderly.

The conspiracy of the far right and the trump loyalists continues. Recently representative Mike McCall the minority On the House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report by the panel’s republican staff essentially saying that the lab leak was the cause of COVID-19 and hinting the NIH’s role in creating the virus.

This is based on no new information or no new data. It is very clear what is going on and it needs to be called out. It is all part of “The Big Lie”. First, trump actually won the election; next, January 6th was a friendly visit to the capital book shop; next trump was right and China caused the virus; next Fauci and the NIH helped the Chinese create the virus; next, discredit Fauci and it looks like trump is telling the truth. It is plain and simple a concerted effort aimed at getting trump re-elected and exonerating him from any blame in the complete mess up of his response to COVID-19.

August 20,2021

There is still ongoing controversy among some people regarding whether the idea about giving a boost was justified by the data. I had a good conversation with Paul Offit who feels that we may have jumped the gun. Vincent Racaniello has written in his blog that he does not think that the boosters are justified. They are all waiting to see data regarding an increase in hospitalization as a result of delta and waning immunity. I still believe given the Israel data that boosters in their country are already showing a significant decreases in the number of breakthrough infections that we did the right thing in making our decision. In addition, those who object seemed to forget about the fact that short of hospitalizations a lot of people get seriously ill with symptoms and signs of long COVID that can be very troublesome. The boosters are safe and to put it in plain terms it can help, and it certainly cannot hurt.

August 22, 2021 (Sunday) - (no shows for me today - predominantly Vivek Murthy)

Had a zoom call today with Jeff and the medical team planning how we can roll out the booster situation putting all the pieces together with the FDA, the CDC, and the acip. We also heard that FISA will get it’s BLA on Monday August 23rd. One of the important parts of the discussion was my relating data that we have received from the Minister of Health of Israel. The data clearly show that hospitalizations for people with two doses of vaccine are going up significantly particularly among the elderly and those with underlying conditions. In addition, they are showing that the efficacy of two doses against infection and symptomatic disease has dramatically diminished, and when you give the third dose boost, this turns it around dramatically and diminishes the breakthrough infections. These data are well ahead of the somewhat disjointed data from the CDC. However what it does do is that we are correct in asking for boosters essentially for everyone.

August 23, 2021 - Global USA

BLA granted for Pfizer by the FDA!!

My Note: The MAHA cabal tried to promote the theory that the license being given negated the liability waiver in the PREP Act. A clear reading of the Act proves this was not the case but they tried to make a conspiracy theory relating to the delay in using the approved labels as they used up stock with EUA labels, claiming thid was to provide immunity to Pfizer which it had regardless. This was when I realized MAHA had been taken over

August 27, 2021

The intelligence community report on the origins came out and in some respects it was good news in that they felt fairly confident that it was not a bioweapon nor that it was bioengineered.

They still left open the possibility that it could be a lab leak ; However, more elements of the intelligence community felt that it was a natural occurrence compared to the single component (FBI who seemed to feel strongly that it was a lab leak, although this is based on no data at all.

The reaction to the report was rather typical with Bob Garry saying that he was pleased that it ruled out bio engineering and David Relman making the incredible statement in a Nature news article that he would like to see all of the records of the NIH in their dealing with Chinese scientists. Truly amazing! There is no doubt that he has an agenda here and that is unfortunate.

Sep 29, 2021

Matthew Memoli is turning into a real problem. He has written an email dated July 30th to me to Hugh Auchincloss and to Cliff Lane. The long and short of it is that he feels that vaccinating people is a bad idea even though he is the major proponent of challenge studies for

vaccines. He believes that by vaccinating people we will be selecting for variants which in the long run will be detrimental to the population. This is a little bit more sophisticated effort than that of Scott Atlas. He has gone further than that, however. He has released the email to congressional committees and to the press and now without a doubt he is going to be talking about the fact that even though he is a clinical center employee he will refuse to follow the vaccine mandate that soon will be implemented at the NIH. In addition, he likely will go on the media spouting this extraordinary philosophy of his. I have made it clear to everyone that we should not interfere in any way with what he is doing because without a doubt he will say that we are trying to muzzle him and that will create more of a problem than the incredible nonsense that he is spewing. It looks like we will just have to buckle down and let him proceed with his craziness and hopefully he will not do a lot of damage to our attempts to get people vaccinated. It is inconceivable to me that he actually feels that it is OK to let everybody get infected just so that we can get immunity where the virus is not selected for by vaccine induced immunity. Letting people get infected has led to 680,000 deaths in the USA thus far. How can he miss the fact that the virus circulating within people who don’t get an adequate immune response will lead to variants just as easily as vaccine immunity-induced mutations. He just makes no sense at all.

Matt Memoli has now gone completely rogue. He is turning into a complete Scott Atlas (see above). Not only does he think that we should not be vaccinating people, he believes that mandating is unethical because it’s going to make matters worse vis-à-vis the immune response. I thought nothing could be worse than that, but now he’s done something unbelievable. He has taken a speech or an interview that I gave saying that although children statistically do much, much better than adults which regard to developing severe disease there are still (given the delta variant) a significant number of children who get sick and hospitalized and in fact there are more deaths among children from COVID-19 and there are after flu.

He comes out now with an email to me saying that this is untrue and that there are more deaths by far with flu rather than COVID- 19. In fact, he wants me to publicly retract my statement!!!!

However, what he is doing is that he is looking at “estimated burden of flu” which is calculated with a model at the end of the year which is usually three times the amount of the “reported cases”. I was referring to the reported cases which are much less.

And so, he seems to be out to make me look bad for reasons that I don’t understand except that he is a complete contrarian. He’s an infectious disease person who doesn’t want to vaccinate people, who thinks mandates are unethical, and that I need to retract statements that I’ve made.

He’s a junior member of the institute and he is telling the institute director that I need to retract the statement based on information that he thinks is incorrect, but is correct. Unbelievable what I have to deal with! We have decided that we are not going to do anything with him; w are not going to approach him; we are not going to even talk to him about this since I know from my experience that if we do anything, he will say that we were trying to muzzle him. As far as I am concerned he could say whatever he wants to say, as crazy as it is, whatever he wants to say. Also he said that he is refusing to get vaccinated The problem with this is that the new rule from the federal government is that if he does not get vaccinated he is going to get fired unless he has a religious exemption. If it turns out that he winds up getting fired, he will almost certainly say that it is retaliation.

My Note: Regarding the Flu Fauci is clearly wrong. He is comparing Apples to Oranges. Unlike Flu pretty much anyone who died in the COVID era was tested for COVID with a test that by virtue of its high Ct threshold gave a large number of false positives if they tested positive and died for other reasons they went down as a COVID death. The only deaths reported as flu deaths in children were in those being treated for and tested for flu and then died. Not all children treated for flu were tested and so were not reported as specifically dying of flu (just respiratory infection or viral pneumonia)

Sept. 29, 2021 - Global - 232,600,000/4,800,000; USA - 43,200,000/691,500

Had a very tough and ridiculous interview with Hugh Hewitt. Hugh, who usually is a reasonable, albeit very conservative person, was extremely aggressive with me in an interview in which he kept insisting that people are not getting vaccinated because I am telling them to get vaccinated and strongly suggested that I step down and retire since I am the obstacle to people getting vaccinated. He quoted a survey saying that middle to right people want me to retire and are not getting vaccinated because I’m the messenger telling them to get vaccinated. Truly an incredible train of thought on his part.

He said we need fresh faces telling people to get vaccinated and if we had fresh faces then people would get vaccinated. I countered by saying we do have fresh faces in the form of Rochelle Walensky and Vivek Murthy. And so does he consider that although all three of us are saying to get vaccinated including two new fresh faces that people are not getting vaccinated merely because I’m one of the three people telling them to get vaccinated?? I have never heard of a more distorted train of thought.

This conversation triggered in me some serious thinking about several things including when I actually would want to retire from the untenable situation that I am in of having 10s of millions of people hate me because I stand for the truth.

Also, this nonsense about conflating the discussion about gain of function with the lab leak theory is preposterous and totally distracting and draining of everyone’s energy.

Richard Ebright with his gain of function obsession is a total asshole who is pushing this theory because he “wants to be somebody”. I am terribly disappointed with Jesse Bloom and David Relman for doing somewhat of the same thing. they have been pushing to stop any gain of function research for a long time and I believe that in some respects they are pushing for an even hoping that this was a lab leak, which the molecular analysis of the viruses that we used in the lab compared to the virus SARS-CoV-2 clearly indicate that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into SARS-Cov-2.

The opposition to me is part of the

“big lie” - “Lock her up”; Trump won the election; January 6th was really a friendly visit to the Capitol; “the China virus” and Trump was correct, “Fire Fauci” since he was wrong all along and Capitol; “and so let’s discredit him, and so on.

Quite frankly, I am finally coming to the realization that our democracy is truly threatened and that it is possible, even likely, that our democracy will crumble with the 2024 election. If trump wins, we are finished. If trump loses, his far right lunatics will likely try again to overthrow the election. And with the attempts to have state legislators (Republican) validate the electoral votes, I am really afraid that they might be successful. Having said all of this, there is no way that I am going to retire before this outbreak is under control.

Oct. 7, 2021 - Global - 236,000,000/4,800,000; USA - 43,900,000/707,100

102,000 case today. All parameters continue to come down slowly

Mandates are working - 25% businesses, 40% hospitals and colleges serving 37% of students are using mandates

The nonsense still goes on regarding EcoHealth Alliance and the Congress probing as to the gain of function issue. We now find out that Eco Health was late in the submission of a progress report which showed some increased pathogenicity in a mouse model.

There will certainly be a conflation of their administrative failings with the proposal that many of the far right are pushing that the grant created the virus which as we’ve said multiple times is molecularly impossible.

However, anything that is even a minor infraction of that grant will be conflated with the issue of the origin of the virus. In fact, Eco Health should have let the NIH know that in some of the mouse experiments there was an increase in pathogenicity associated with the chimeric virus. However what people will not appreciate is that even with that increase in pathogenicity, the experiment and the result still does not fall under the category that would trigger PCO.

In other words, According to the operable definition of gain of function of concern at the time, this was not gained a function of concern. Namely, it was not an experiment that would increase the transmissibility and pathogenicity a virus that would likely cause widespread transmission and morbidity/mortality IN HUMANS.

Some people may not like that definition under which we were operating, but that is the definition that was established by outside groups after a 3 year deliberative process. As I have said in the past if they don’t like the definition then they should change the definition. However, what was done was done according to the existing definition at the time.

Oct. 22, 2021 - Global - 242,000,000/4,900,000; USA - 45,100,000/730,000;

Larry Tabak was treated very poorly by several Republican congressmen and senators that he briefed yesterday. They continue to distort the truth insisting that I and to some extent doctor Collins have lied about whether or not the NIH funded “gain of function” research. They do not understand nor do they seem to want to understand that we were operating under the framework of P3CO which clearly indicates that the experiments that were funded by the NIH in Wuhan fell under that auspices and were properly conducted according to the existing guidelines at the time.

They want to hear none of that and continue to insist that we are denying that gain of function research was done and they put forth the preposterous suggestion if not the strong indication that the research that we funded created SARS-CoV-2. It looks like I’m going to have a tough time at the hearing on November the 4th since they are clearly politically motivated and are doing anything to discredit me and the NIH.

Oct. 23, 2021 Global - 242,300,000/4,900,000; USA - 45,300,000/733,834

There was the typical but not unexpected backlash on the part of the far-right media concerning the letter that Larry Tabak sent out concerning the progress report from EcoHealth that was late. In order to be totally transparent, Larry sent out a note to Congressman Comer saying that Ecohealth was late in submitting a progress report of their grant and mentioned in the letter that some of the mice in the study had an increase in viral growth and got sicker.

This was immediately taken up by the far right as proving that Fauci and Collins were lying when they said we did not fund gain of function research at Wuhan. They failed to mention that in that same letter Larry made it very clear that the research did not rise to the scrutiny of P3CO. In other words by our definition, it was not gain of function. This set off a firestorm of far right media craze saying that Francis and I lied. Therefore, I spent the greater part of today. tonight and tomorrow morning putting together a statement for the NIH website to correct the misrepresentation on the part of the far right media

Nov. 4, 2021 - Global - 247,472,724/5,012,337; USA - 46,180,190/747,970

Very important Day!!

Senate HELP Hearing - I together with Dawn O’Connell, Janet Woodcock, Rochelle Walensky testified before the Senate HELP hearing chaired by Patty Murray. We had expected to have the same conflict with Senator Rand Paul who continues to lie egregiously about the gain of function research which he claims was done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded by NIAID. During the last Hearing I had a direct conflict with him in which he accused me of being responsible for the death of four million people by funding research at Wuhan. At that time, I angrily said that he was the liar.

He continued along this line totally misrepresenting facts and accusing me of lying before the Congress. However, in contrast to what I did last time I did not aggressively call him a liar, which he is. What I did was very calmly counter all of his arguments that this was a proven leak from the Wuhan lab, that we were continuing to fund the Wuhan lab, and that I was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chairperson Patty Murray was extremely helpful in allowing me to counter his ranting lies. I closed the session by saying then I have a great deal of respect for the institution of the United States Senate, but in fact everything he said was

“egregiously incorrect “ see link to the actual testimony below: https://bit.ly/2ZZzqAa

Nov. 11, 2021

Just to catch up on what is going on with the Moderna/NIH patent dispute. It has been very clear from the very beginning that there was a very strong collaboration between investigators at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and the Moderna company. In particular John Mascola, Barney Graham, and Kizzmekia Corbett were heavily involved in the development of the mRNA -1273 vaccine.

It was assumed by everyone that there would be a joint patent inventorship. And so, when a few months ago we heard that there was some disagreement among the tech transfer people of the NIH and the lawyers at Moderna, Frances and I engaged in a couple of telephone conversations with Steve Hoge and Stephane Bancef of Moderna.

Steve and Stephane said that the actual inventorship was solely Moderna and that although the NIH had rights to the patent and licensing of the S2P immunogen, Moderna claimed that the actual “inventorship” was theirs.

This is critical since even though we would get a considerable amount of royalty from this technicality and even though we could be “co-owners” of the patent but not inventors of the patent this would still give Moderna complete control over who can or cannot use the mRNA vaccine . This is particularly relevant if we try to get the vaccine produced for low and middle income countries at a very, very low price.

And so, after many attempts at resolving the issue we were very surprised that Moderna unilaterally went out and filed the patent and specifically and explicitly excluded John, Barney, and Kizzy. The entire academic community, when they found out about this, was totally taken aback. And so, just this week Francis made it clear in an interview with Reuters that we are going to bring Moderna to court and let the courts determined the outcome

My Note: NIH dropped the suit in 2023

Nov 26, 2021

Not sure about the evasion of vaccines, but the situation is certainly heating up. Will discuss whether or not we’re going to restrict travel from South Africa later today at a 12 noon call with Jeff.

Email from Cyrus Shahpar on 11/26/2021:

NGS-SA

Summary

• Epidemiological data suggest sustained increase in COVID-19 incidence across
  Gauteng, possibly fueled by cluster outbreaks

• New variant (B.1.1.529) detected in multiple samples from across Gauteng

• Public and private testing labs in Gauteng have noticed a significant and rapid increase in detection of variant (based on PCR proxy), and now increasing in other provinces

• Mutation profile predicted to give significant immune evasion and enhanced transmissibility - urgent work already started to understand full significance

• We can make some predictions about the impact of mutations in this variant, but full significance uncertain and the vaccines remain the critical issue

Nov. 27, 2021 - GLOBAL USA

Conversation with Jerome (Jay) Powell, Chair of the US Federal Reserve. Bob Grady texted me this morning to connect me with Jay Powell who wanted to talk to me about the implications of the new variant on the economy since he was in the process with the Federal Reserve of making trillions of dollars in loans to other countries. He wanted to hear from me first-hand about what my projections for the outbreak would be. He will be testifying before Congress this coming week and we agreed that I would keep him posted as to any additional information that comes out. I briefed him thoroughly and what we know up to this point.

Nov. 28, 2021 (Sunday) Global USA

Very Important Day!! - An extraordinary amount has been going on over the last 24 to 48 hours. It is very clear that with the Omicorn variant is rapidly spreading from the epicenter in South Africa with mostly travel-related cases to a number of countries at this point including Botswana, the Netherlands, England, Hong Kong, Australia, Italy, Israel, Belgium, Czech Republic, and several other countries. This is unquestionably a highly transmissible virus. We had a very productive zoom call at 12 noon Washington DC time with our South African colleagues once again. The main players among the South Africans were Tulio de Oliveira, Glenda Gray, and Carolyn Williamson. The have been extraordinarily transparent and helpfu giving us data in real time. It is a shame that we had to block travel from RSA. However, we would have gotten killed by the press if we did not as we are now getting killed for having done it. I expressed my deep gratitude to them for their help.

The South Africans gave us a really good feel about the fact that there are things that we know and things that we don’t know at this point. The combination of the many mutations in the spike protein together with the fact that they are seeing spikes in infection among people who have recovered from delta as well as those who have been vaccinated. The critical question is how severe is this disease that likely will result from this new infection.

Incredibly busy Thanksgiving Day. We had zoom calls with the Pfizer group led by Mikael Dolsten to scope out what their plan is regarding scaling up boosters against prototype as well as the advisability or not of developing Omicron-specific boosters. Also met with the Moderna people for similar discussions.

Clearly, the virus is spreading widely with five cases in Israel all of which were picked up by screening at the airport. E-mail from Danny Douek:

My Note: Huge 6 month gap in Fauci diary conveniently missing the huge death toll from Omicron despite its lower IFR

August 13, 2022

More drama with regard to the CDC and Rochelle Walenski. After much going back and forth between the CDC and the other docs including me, Vivek, Steve Cha, and to some extent David Kessler, we thought we had gotten them pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission. The reason this is an issue is that if they came out with that statement, which in fact is not entirely true since there is some degree of modest but declining protection as you would expect, then this would conflict with the statement and effort of recommending that people get the updated bivalent BA.5 vaccine in September. In addition, it would undermine the DoJ’s efforts at mandates for vaccines under certain circumstances. In any event, the CDC agreed to pull back on the statement of absolute lack of efficacy of vaccines against infections and transmission and take a more measured approach of saying that the vaccines provides only modest and waning efficacy against infection and transmission and that is why we should heed the advice of getting the updated booster in Sept. However, although they did this on their website, the MMWR that cam out yesterday had the same original damning language.

Sept. 11, 2022

The New York Post continues to lie and distort. This is abut the conspiracy theory that Mark Zuckerberg and I were colluding to suppress free speech:

Fauci’s direct line to Zuck proves Facebook COVID censorship was all about power, not public health

Sep 15,2022

The Lancet report on COVID by a panel chaired by Jeffrey Sachs has recently come out and inappropriately equated the possibility of a lab leak with that of a natural occurrence of the virus. There has been an uproar among the biology community against Jeff who apparently removed from the panel anyone who felt strongly about the natural occurrence and actually went on a podcast with Robert F Kennedy, Jr talking about how the lab leak was likely the cause even though there is absolutely no evidence to indicate this.

Prominent virologists including Angela Rasmussen and Peter Hotez have come out very strongly condemning Jeff saying that he should have been removed as chair on the basis of his strong prejudice and certainly on the basis of his allying himself with Robert F Kennedy junior. This is another example I believe of Richard Horton the editor of Lancet trying to get involved in controversial issues which bring attention to his journal. This is not the first time he has done this:

Sept. 16, 2022

I have always thought that Bob redfield was somewhat of a bizarre personality and his history dating back to his time at Walter Reed has proven that. But I didn’t think that he was as crazy as he is now manifested by an interview he gave with a totally weird person Paul Thacker in which he condemned Francis Collins and me I think we’re the first ones beginning this award for misleading the American public and for lying to the American public and even accusing me of lying under oath at a congressional hearing. It is truly unfortunate that as a former CDC director he has stooped so low as to get into the conspiracy theory space:

Oct. 17, 2022

Crazy thing has now emerged. Boston University investigators have done an experiment that clearly would have fallen under the category of oversight by the PCO process. Yet they never told our NIAID program people about it, nor was there any mention of these experiments in the grant that they cited in the pre print paper, nor was there any mention of this in the progress reports from the grant. What they did was swap an omicron spike on to a Wuhan matrix to determine the effect of the chimera on the function of the virus. As you might expect the people who have been attacking us for gain-of-function research are jumping all over this.

We are putting out a statement indicating that we knew nothing of these experiments and they should have told us about them and put it through the PCO process. Let us see how this plays

Oct. 19, 2022

BU admits that they did the experiments on their own and did not use NIAID funds. Stll ongoing discussion whether this was actually GOF since fewer mice died. In any event, we are clear of this.

Nov. 23, 2022

I had my 7 hour (on the clock) deposition by lawyers for the Missouri Vs Biden plaintiffs. It showed up as spectators as the plaintiff’s lawyer John Sauer questioned me for seven hours. I had been well prepared for the previous few days by the DoJ lawyers including Adam Kirschner and Josh Gardner as well as Amanda Chuzi Anant Humar, Brian Netter and HHS council Chris Hammond.

Although this was supposed to be on the topic of the Biden administration including me interfering with free speech by influencing the social media platforms to not allow opinions differing from our own to be put on social media, very many of the questions were directed at things unrelated to that including the origins of COVID, the Wuhan grant, Peter Daszak, my position on masking, and a variety of other issues that the Congress has been concerned about.

I must say I did extraordinarily well and the DOJ lawyers said that that was one of the best performances and the deposition that they have ever seen.

Dec. 17, 2022

It is clear (I have not been reporting it every day) that the far, extreme right and Qanon literally hate me and De Santis is starting to play into this with his growin campaign for presidency. From the New York Times: Although “vaccine paranoia and Fauci hatred are still niche positions in the electorate at large,” if anyone “imagines that replacing Trump with DeSantis as the G.O.P.’s leader would signal a party on its way to becoming sane again is in for a rude shock.”

End-Fauci is Retired

Ps-This is from January 2022. First substack post related to COVID. I learned much more since but still might be worth a read

6 1/2 years after news of a novel virus spreading in Wuhan most people have decided its Natural Origin or Accidental Lab Release. These were the only two options given to you for your consideration.

Natural Origin which may or may not include accidental lab release

Engineered Virus which includes accidental lab release, and you are given the choice to believe the virus was engineered by Chinese scientists or by US scientists or some form of collaboration and then accidentally released from a WIV labs.

Despite living in the Age of Terrorism with governments controlled by Evil Oligarchs and an Epstein Class that benefitted greatly from the Pandemic while the virus seemingly spared all of the active members of the political and economic elites, nobody thought to contemplate deliberate release. Well, almost nobody.

The infamous Yan Report from 2020 linked to Steve Bannon claimed the Chinese intentionally engineered the virus. While the published report did not discuss how it was released , on the Tucker Carlson show Yan claimed they deliberately released it on their own people

Her main arguments included:

1. The Chinese Communist Party was willing to accept domestic casualties. Yan argued that the leadership viewed its own population as expendable if doing so served broader strategic objectives. She suggested the government was prepared to sacrifice some Chinese citizens to achieve larger geopolitical goals.

2. The outbreak could be controlled domestically. She claimed that Chinese authorities believed they could contain the virus within China through strict lockdowns, surveillance, and quarantine measures after the initial spread, while other countries would struggle to do the same.

3. Strategic advantage over other nations.Yan suggested that a global pandemic would weaken rival economies, increase China’s relative influence, and shift the balance of power internationally.

4. Confidence in state control.She argued that the Chinese government’s ability to rapidly mobilize public health measures and control information gave it confidence that it could manage the domestic consequences better than democratic countries.

Yan pretty much got a lot right, but where she is wrong is that the virus was engineered in US and its release was coordinated in partnership with the US

I wrote this 2 years ago

Today I will go over Senator Rubins Chinese Timeline (2019-2021) which was presented as Circumstantial Evidence that Sars-Cov-2 was a Lab Accident by WIV. On the contrary, its quite consistent with China knowing what was coming and trying to lay down the evidence for Lab Accident before and after the virus release and setting up its own lab as a patsy

It also shows how China intentionally understated the spread, covered up when the spread began (September-October), and sought to hide the sequences of the early virus that was circulating . Probably because early sequences provided evidence of a designed virus, possibly even multiple viruses until the only virus left after outcompeting the others was what we know of as Sars-Cov-2 Wuhan version. The understatement and coverup of spread was to give the virus time to adopt to humans and spread more quickly once it escaped Hubei and Chinese borders

I believe the initial virus seeded on the densely populated Wuhan was attenuated and spreading slowly with few symptoms except in some elderly where it was written off as flu or cold. After a number of transmission cycles it reverted to virulence, as expected and picked up some mutations that ended up being the Wuhan Sars-Cov-2 . A live GOF Experiment, or Live Exercise as Pompeo called it.

SC2 with improved transmissibility then spread internationally where it was able to sustain transmission in lower density populations and continued mutating as Lockdowns , Masks and Vaccination drove evolution of the Virus to become more transmissible. In other words Wuhan was used as the initial GOF Laboratory, a perfect pick given it high population density entering Flu Season.

A US DoD study published in January 2020 pointed out Influenza Vaccinations increase susceptibility to Coronavirus infection and China increased Flu vaccination in fall of 2019

2019, October 31, He Qinghua, deputy director of National Health Commission’s Disease Prevention and Control Bureau, said at a news conference that about 28 million doses of flu vaccines will enter the domestic market this winter and next spring, which is peak flu season in most parts of China－more than double the number available during the last flu season.

More than 20 million doses of flu vaccine have been released to the market after approval, he said.

About 8 million doses have been used for vaccination so far, twice the number for the same period last year, he said.

Why would China agree to this? Some of it was for the same reason as in the US. An opportunity to cull some of the elderly population (save social security and pension funds$$), consolidate power over the people, grow their biotechnology industry, and increase digital surveillance/ censorship as called for by the Great Reset

Obviously, they would have required evidence the virus would not ethnically target Chinese population as proposed by PNAC in 1999 (it seemed more severe in SLAV and Iranian populations) or harm their children and young adults. How they received that assurance is not known, but the US knew the consequences of double crossing them on this as China has nukes and lots of economic leverage.

Another thing in favor of China agreeing to this was to reduce American influence in China , which was becoming a growing problem for Xi as we can see with the trouble the US was causing in Hong Kong. Covid cleared out a lot of the Western -US Agents, and some Chinese pro-Western Billionaires as well in expectation that Xi would clean house

And of course, as a GLOBALIST Project the primary goal was to reduce the living standards and consumption in the West. The West would suffer economically and have more loss of life than in China although we cant be sure since their numbers cant be trusted. As Napoleon said, don’t hesitate to help your enemy weaken itself. Given tensions with the US over Taiwan and an expectation of conflict in the future, weakening of the US was attractive.

Some might say COVID weakened China as well, and they are right, but as they say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Chinas expectation was they could recover, but the US was already a patient with a terminal illness and COVID would deliver a mortal blow and accelerate the US terminal phase. Just look at the debt, it jumped from $24 to $34 Trillion in 5 years thanks in large part to COVID.

Also every Crisis is an Opportunity, a fundamental element of Disaster Capitalism. Make no mistake, China is Capitalist. Its Socialism is as much a pipe dream as our Democracy and Free Market Economy.

The GLOBALISTS also wanted a Multipolar World as a first step away from US hegemony before achieving its final goal of One World Government. Then, those achieving Planetary Citizenship will be Free, with rights and privileges not constrained by Western Civilizations archaic Morality and Laws .

Citizenship will not be available to all, however, only a small minority have that option. Only those genetically suitable to propagate and evolve Homo Sapiens to Homo Deus will be granted citizenship, leaving the rest of us as the Neanderthals of today. FYI-we didn’t treat the Neanderthals very nice, not at all.

Those not worthy of becoming Planetary Citizens become like Palestinians, the Modern Neanderthals. Israel is developing the methods of control that will be utilized against the Global Governments non-Citizens

China was likely in favor of all that, perhaps having been promised some autonomy as a state in a Global Republic.

I suspect the US provoking Russia over Ukraine was a related Globalist project, as was the Israeli stand down on 10/7 and subsequent Genocide, but I digress

Whereas the US timeline was littered with virus hunting, GOF, pandemic response, the Chinese were focused more on being able to assign blame (Synthetic Biology, shoddy Lab Safety) so that nobody could accuse them of participating in OPERATION COVID.

Chinas main role besides having WIV be the designated patsy and using its population as guinea pigs to evolve a low pathogenic virus that would spread globally , was to psyop the Western Populations and condition them to be fearful of the Wuhan Virus and demonstrate to the World that Lockdowns and Authoritarian Measures were the appropriate response.

Some of you might question the need to set up WIV as a patsy, why not just sell Natural Origin. All they need to do is find or manufacture an intermediate host. I thought of this too and I think it was because they did not trust the US to back it up, and feared they would release information proving it was not, exposing China to accusations of nefarious intent. After all, it was indeed a lab created virus. In any case, either way they would be blamed. With Accidental Lab Release the US has to share the blame for funding research. With Natural Origin its all on China. These bats were in their back yard. SARS was a warning. With their authoritarian policies and surveillance they should have detected this far earlier (if it was natural, which it was not).

On the down side Lab leak is also one step closer to intentional design , which neither side could admit to, but given that China knew it was created by US they knew they would be protected somewhat from Sanctions as they had a card to play . If the US tried to blame China for engineering the virus as a bioweapon or sanction them they could release their own intelligence . Intelligence is a two way street.

Sometime after Lockdowns began in China and peoples anger mounted, China then floated the idea among its population, that the virus was a Bioterrorist attack on China by the US. This united the people against the Evil Empire in the West and helped reduce speculation that the government might have supported the attack.

China made little effort to convince an international audience, at least not the Western Audience since it would not be in Chinas interest for the US to be blamed for the Bioterrorism Attack which affected the world, as Chinas role in supporting it might be exposed.

Both the US and China were partners, so if Deliberate Creation and Release were proven, that would be devastating to both Countries. Kind of like Mutually Assured Destruction. Nobody wants to go there. If one falls, they both fall.

Covid Origin Declassification

The much hyped Tulsi Gabbard document release on COVID origins turned out to be a big nothing burger. Just another psyop to point out Fauci and China as scapegoats. Yawn

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2026/4165-fauci-funded-wuhan-lab-research-that-sparked-

Here is a link to Drastic’s Billy Bosticksons summary for anyone interested. He also seemed pretty underwhelmed.

BILLY BOSTICKSON

The June 18th Tulsi Gabbard Document Release

“Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus’ lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused i…

Read more

2 months ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · BILLY BOSTICKSON

The documents were in 4 parts, totaling a paltry 400 pages. Heavily redacted with a number of duplicates and copies of journal articles, Daszaks previously released research findings, summaries of media reports. Most email had both sender and recipients redacted.

Most of the underlying facts were already publicly known. The documents do not materially change the evidence regarding COVID’s origin. The release contains allegations and interpretations rather than definitive proof.

Because there is so little there many social media influencers simply invented stuff or presented stuff not in the release, knowing few will bother to read the documents for themselves.

That said, I did find a few things mildly interesting

Wuhans BLS 4 Lab

We have all heard about this one. While I knew Chinas government had forbid Ebola research there I did not know that SARS research was also forbidden as late as 2018, at least according to this from our State Departments Beijing Office, which no doubt was staffed by CIA

Barics talk At NASEM on February 3,2020

We all know of this talk, although the details of his talk were not presented. This is an IC attendee summary.

Baric:

He is not aware of WIV introducing mutations into the hACE2 receptor. He is aware of some chimera work, which was published.

• Insertion of furin cleaved site not unprecedented. He gave some examples where this was done as part of mouse adaptation during passage. However, that work was not done in this group of coronaviruses.

• In terms of Baric’s involvement on the panel, he did mention that he has been linked to chimera work in 2016 that social media claims is linked to nCoV and he suggested that could make his membership a political problem. The academics and the academy disagreed. I think he was bringing it up as more of a “no surprises” thing rather than trying to be excused from the committee.

• Mutations in hACE2 do NOT look like perfect engineering (i.e. the sequences were not modified to give textbook perfect binding). If the sequence were engineered, one would expect that it would be engineered as perfectly as possible. Hence, evidence for natural evolution.

• Wet markets as vehicles for passage

• Binding was optimized to humans based on modelling (Baric dissented). 3 papers are currently on biorXiv. Questions: Was this the case early in the outbreak or was this affinity acquired through other host, etc?

• Biochemical data for hACE2 receptor modification would be useful

• With furin site introduction, it could open new classes of drugs to try

• Rules out BW (“nothing there”) consistent with natural evolution

• Several hundred sequences that the Chinese currently have are not being made available

• Can’t rule out lab accident

• Will never be able to distinguish between natural vs. lab accident with current data

• Can rule out BW

• Earliest available samples are from Dec 24. Need samples before this time point (both market and non-market) from Wuhan more than we need geographically-diverse samples

• Europe, Australia, and Singapore are sharing genomes. Not a hindrance. CDC is the central point for sequencing efforts for US samples.

• Phylogenetics are clear, but tying modifications to function is not clear. Need sequences from animal reservoir and human from earlier in the outbreak.

• Quite possible there were other mutations/strains that sputtered out in early December before dying off and 2019-nCoV took over. Need sequences from that time period to check.

• Agreed with Redacted that lab accident can’t be ruled out, but also that there is no way to distinguish from natural at this time.

• Needs obtain temporally and geographically diverse samples

• We are assuming that there is only a single lineage/introduction, when there may be multiple. Need more sequences from earlier than Dec 24 to try to find out ( comment: Finally!).

• Request should prioritize sequences over isolates. Isolates can be made synthetically if needed. Other members wanted isolates.

Of course, Baric would want to rule out a BW or engineering since this would make him a suspect. His reasons for why it was not a BW is precisely why the designer of the virus would not perfectly optimize or engineer the virus. They would try to convince us it was natural origin or accidentally released by Chinese researchers, hence the release in Wuhan which is home to a BSL-4 lab hundreds of miles from the nearest bat cave, with WIV scientists who worked with Sars like viruses in collaboration with Ralph Baric and Petr Daszak with funding from Faucis NIAID via Eco Health Alliance, not to mention the now defunct USAID Predict

So if you were going to deliberately release an engineered virus to start a Pandemic, Wuhan was the perfect spot. High Density population and an international travel hub facilitating spread, with a ready made scapegoat in WIV (China). After all, few people were going to buy natural origin because they can not explain the FCS or lack of an intermediate host in China.

Iran Claimed COVID was a US Bioweapon

Well, of course they would. I did find it interesting that Iran was probably the only place where political and other members of the elite class died in significant numbers

Multiple government ministers and senior officials have been diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 positive, as well as 23 members of the parliament (around 8% of all MPs) by 3 March.[30] At least 17 Iranian politicians and officials had died from the virus by 25 March

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Iran

Mitre Whistleblower

Redacted called me today. Redacted

used to work for DOE and is now a MITRE fellow working for NIM-Cl. Some colleagues in DOE

who know redacted for redacted PhD in biodefense + the chief medical officer at MITRE have been reaching out to redacted to get redacted thoughts. Redacted said redacted has not been volunteering these thoughts with others, including the State Dept.

We had a very long conversation about FBI’s redacted. I said that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen FBI coming out of the gates with “concerns remain regarding this line of reporting.” And that multiple IC agencies and offices have expressed concern over this report, so much so that at least three have recommended recall.

Redacted offered a “devil’s

advocate” view that a non-expert could poorly describe actual genetic similarities between viruses the way that this report did in para 4. I said that similarities can occur naturally over time and are not evidence on their own of manipulation. Redacted agreed, but left it at “yeah but it’s possible it could have been engineered, right?”

To, Redacted. the “rat” virus description definitely seemed off the wall but offered that if you consider this from the perspective of a non-expert talking to the FBI agent, maybe that’s a misinterpretation of “RaT” G13, the “genetic relative” to COVID-19. He made the point that sometimes the idea of an FBI report has been shown to be correct even if the details sound off.

I said the IC still has concerns regarding the credibility of this report and suggested (although maybe not as directly as I am typing it now) we’re not going to make an assessment based on this IIR alone.

Redacted briefly mentioned DOD’s

“A suspicious added furin-site”) as another report giving him concern,

although I reassured him that the IC has been talking to a lot of experts about furin in the past two months. For your reference I have attached the enclosure associated with that report.

I flagged the attached March 17 article (thanks to NCPC) as an example of the scientific community walking through some of these “oddities,” quoting the conclusion that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Redactedcountered that the problem is that no one is working off the same facts/part of the code and I didn’t have time to ask what meant by that.

If I had to guess, people are flagging these flashy reports for redacted from technical to get redacted thoughts but aren’t flagging reports from experts that support the opposite claims. Largely, it seemed that Redacted just wanted to confirm that the IC was aware of these technical oddities and was taking the open-source research into account in our analysis. I explained that IC analysts with technical backgrounds have discussed this topic at length with experts and shared the following links as evidence.

It’s worth noting that in 2020- the DHS contracted with Mitre to work on a pandemic response plan, to “engage, inform and guide” mayors, governors and emergency response leaders dealing with a pandemic.

Mitre would advise on “nonpharmaceutical interventions” (eg closing schools, stores and implementing social distancing)

In a $16.3 million contract signed with the CDC in late June, Mitre was asked to help build “an enduring national capability to contain Covid-19.”

Yan Report

You all remember this. Yan appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News in mid-September 2020 to share the results of her just-completed report showing Covid-19 was likely engineered in a Chinese lab. On Carlson’s show, she claimed it was intentionally released into the world.

The publication of the paper by Yan who was seeking asylum in the US – was linked to Steve Bannon, Epstein’s pal. Maybe Epstein was directing Operation COVID from some secret location after his “suicide”.😃

IC-Sep 14, 2020

Hi team - Is anyone looking at the open source report that a Chinese virologist claims to have proof that COVID-19 was made in a Wuhan lab? We’re getting questions from our leadership and I figured those with more technical expertise probably have already evaluated this report. (New York Post, Chinese Virologist Claims She has Proof COVID-19 was Made in Wuhan Lab, 11 September 2020)

Response

A couple virologists at State and I reviewed a version of her paper - it’s been circulating for at least a month or so. In short, it’s nonsense. The conclusions she draws require some real misinterpretations of the science and many contradicted by published work on the virus evolution/genetics.

Defuse-Drastic

IC-Some of what’s in this is new to me, at least. In particular the statement that SARS-CoV-2 is “an American-created recombinant bat vaccine.” A lot of it is not new, though. Some of the claims in this article are flat out wrong, while other claims seem to conflate facts and make wild analytic leaps. DRASTIC is not, as identified in the article, associated with the US government. It is a loose group of individuals on Twitter who describe themselves as “internet researchers and sleuths” who post articles on COVID origins arguing that the pandemic was caused by a lab-related incident.

We’ll dig more into this today. FYl, we are also setting up another COVID sync with the IC in the next couple of weeks.

Biological Weapons

IC-“the ref to the ODNI 2016 document was probably the ATA:

We continue to monitor emerging technologies that are potentially disruptive for WMD, as well as the health and economic sectors. For example, research in genome editing conducted by countries with different regulatory or ethical standards than those of Western countries increases the risk of the creation of potentially harmful biological agents or products. 0m(mfvM|vivi][vii[x) Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use technology, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications. Advances in genome editing in 2015 have compelled groups of high-profile US and European biologists to question unregulated editing of the human germline (cells that are relevant for reproduction), which might create inheritable genetic changes. x|xi|xi Genome editing systems could enable states to develop enhanced or advanced BW agents; however, states would almost certainly face technical challenges to using genome editing systems to create advanced BW agents. We have no intelligence reporting that any country is using these systems for offensive purposes, although legitimate and nefarious purposes are very hard to distinguish, given that the facilities are small and the commercial incentive is great.”

Like I said, not much in there

There was a separate declassification on biolabs

https://www.odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2026/4163-pr-10-26

4 pages of nothing much

https://www.dni.gov/files/BIOLAB_Slides.pdf

According to the ODNI press release, the U.S. government funded more than 120 biological laboratories in over 30 countries, including more than 40 facilities in Ukraine. The files describe programs funded through initiatives such as the Defense Department’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program, originally created after the Soviet Union collapsed to secure dangerous pathogens and biological materials.

Some facilities worked with pathogens such as:

• Anthrax

• Tularemia

• Plague

• Ebola

• Marburg

• SARS-related viruses

• Other infectious diseases of public-health concern.

The released material does not to show an active U.S. biological weapons program in Ukraine. The documents primarily describe public-health, disease surveillance, pathogen security, and biosafety activities that had already been acknowledged publicly for years.

I talked about Ukraine Biolabs back in 2022 and how they connected to Daszak and Metabiota.

Metabiotas founder is Nathan Wolfe who is also in the Epstein Files . A nice summary of Epsteins relationship with Wolfe is here

https://stanforddaily.com/2026/02/03/former-stanford-professor-nathan-wolfe-92-planned-sexual-behavior-research-described-interns-with-epstein/

I also speculated that perhaps Ukraine was a test bed for adopting Sars-Cov-2 to humans as the virus seemed well adopted to Slav population relative to some other ethnic groups

It seems to have a special affinity for Slavic Populations. Despite having only 3% of the Global Population Slavic Countries accounted for 12% of COVID Deaths. Despite less than 40% of the US population Russia had a similar number of. Excess Deaths before the War with Ukraine

One reason the release attracted attention today is that Gabbard linked some of these overseas biolab programs to concerns about gain-of-function research and inadequate oversight but the documents do not demonstrate that the labs were conducting prohibited or weapons-related research.

The Press Release says

President Trump understands the serious threat dangerous Gain-of-Function research poses to the American people, which is why he took decisive action on May 25, 2025, signing EO 14292 to end federal funding of Gain-of-Function research around the world.

The executive order required the following timelines:

• Within 90 days: revise or replace the 2024 Framework for Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening.

• Within 120 days: revise or replace the 2024 U.S. Government Policy for Oversight of Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) and Pathogens with Enhanced Pandemic Potential (PEPP), which is the main gain-of-function oversight framework.

• Within 180 days: develop a strategy for oversight of non-federally funded high-risk biological research.

Although those deadlines fell in August–November 2025, there is no publicly available replacement policy on the White House, OSTP, or HHS websites that supersedes the 2024 framework.

Conclusion-The 2 releases were a nothing burger that does little to shed light on COVID origins

This brings us to Major Murphy who was the guy who released DEFUSE

Major Murphy

His name keeps popping up. Major Murphy got promoted to Lt Colonel after leaking a document in 2021 that DARPA apparently wanted to keep hidden. After finding the unclassified DEFUSE proposal in a folder marked classified he reported it to his superiors and then released it. No Snowden treatment for Murphy. He got promoted. What does this tell you?

To me it suggests DEFUSE was a psyop meant to provide patsies in Fauci, Daszak, Baric and WIV to support a WIV lab leak alternative to the unlikely natural origin hypothesis. This ignores the more likely hypothesis that Sars-Cov-2 was an attempt to create a live attenuated virus vaccine for soldiers that worked so well that someone decided to unleash it on the world, starting in Wuhan. They used the spread of a novel virus which mostly only harmed the elderly to declare a pandemic and explode the national debt by $5 trillion.

Some might question why the Elite class would want to explode the debt. The answer is simple, government debt becomes an asset of corporate billionaires and the associated government spending trickles up into their pockets.

There were other benefits as well. Fast tracking a new Vaccine Technology (Operation Warp Speed) and wiping a million seniors off social security and pension funds. The Pandemic provided government to assert its control over the population with lockdowns and other measures (vaccine cards, masking, testing) and provided the opportunity to exert control over the information space by partnering with corporate media and tech controlled social media.

As I mentioned before the rapid global coordination to adopt measures previously condemned or discouraged by WHO suggested preplanning. Indeed there were many pandemic exercises conducted from 2016-2019 culminating in Event 201 in October 2019

Cygmus (UK-2016) , MARS (Munich-2017), SPARS (2017), Clade X (2018), Crimson Contagion (1st half-2019) and Event 201 (Oct-2019)

Since 2020 there has only been one comparable exercise (Catastrophic Contagion in 2022), although one might call Operation COVID a live exercise as Mike Pompeo did here

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4875167/user-clip-mike-pompeo-live-exercise

Its also important to note that so called adversaries in China and Russia all went along with it. The theater orchestrated by China in the early days of COVID with young men dropping dead in the middle of the street and picked up by medical staff in white space suits as China locked down set the stage for fear and drastic measures that would follow in the West

Chinas role in selling the Virus as a dangerous Pandemic threat suggests to me they signed off on its release in Wuhan after verifying it was essentially a relatively benign virus (IFR 0.2%). China would of course have its own reasons for going along, one of which was to reduce the influence of the West on its population and knowing the plan of Western Elites for their own populations they were happy to assist them in subverting Western Democracy. They would also use the Pandemic to increase surveillance and control of its own population

Mathew Pottinger would become assitant National Security Adviser in September 2019 as Josh Bolton stepped down just as Operation Covid was set to go live. Pottinger was a China expert who happened to be in Hong Kong as a journalist during SARS, and was quick to push the NSC to adopt Chinas measures in the US, which the NSC did by approving PanCAP adopted for COVID in April 2020 . This was used to lock down the states

, or at least convince Governors to lockdown their population with the promise of funds from the $2 trillion CARE Act as the carrot to encourage them to do so

Matts father is the CIA connected Stanley Pottinger who shared an office with Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-1980’s. Stanley would become one of the prominent Epstein victim lawyers who is alleged to have had a romantic relationship with Maria Farmer

Anyways, lets focus on Major Murphy claim from August 2021. He wrote to the DoD Inspector General that based on the DEFUSE proposal that

“SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine or its precursor virus.”

He would later tell us

Eventually, I concluded that what leaked from the WIV could be a bat vaccine or its precursor. It was feasible that the US would try to avoid a SARS-CoV outbreak by stopping it at its source, not by halting its infections amongst people, but by halting its infections amongst the bats. Americans are creative, even if imprudent, and technologically confident enough to try it. This concept seemed to fit within the PREEMPT program construct as well. Moreover, the unusual nature and pathology of the virus hinted that it could be a vaccine or be vaccine-like. A technological challenge as difficult as inoculating bats in China would be tried at DARPA first.

There are several problems with this claim.

Defuse proposed immune-modulating interferon treatments, recombinant chimeric SARS spike-protein vaccines, and viral-vector (poxvirus) delivery systems, with topical/grooming-based delivery methods being a major focus. There was no proposal to vaccinate bats with a live replicating vaccine virus (aka self spreading vaccine), not that the Chinese government would permit such a lunatic experiment on their soil. Corona Viruses in bats recombine with other coronaviruses viruses creating new viruses so this would be the height of stupidity to introduce a novel man made virus in bats.

And even if there were such an idea, and if Baric could create a virus which would limit recombination, does anyone really believe a virus created in the US by Ralph Baric for use as a vaccine would not be subject to preliminary testing for patent purposes that would have detected the virus affinity for human cells and not bat cells? Ridiculous.

Defuse-Human Vaccine

As I wrote in early 2024

This is the Bombshell nobody seems to be talking about.

This was from Daszaks notes on DEFUSE draft. They had the idea to use DEFUSE to engineer broad based vaccinations for humans in 2018. Thats the Bombshell. Everything else is a distraction or diversion to keep you from seeing that Sars-Cov-2 was a self spreading Vaccine

DEFUSE was rejected because it was perceived as a BAT VaccinationExperiment for a Virus that posed little threat to Combat Troops (unlike Nipah, Ebola, etc), not to mention its cost ($14 million)

But there were elements in DEFUSE that looked fundable, particularly this.

We will identify the best consensus candidate and synthesize the genome using commercial vendors (e.g., BioBasic, etc.), as six contiguous CDNA pieces linked by unique restriction pieces endonuclease sites that do not disturb the coding sequence, but allow for full length genome assembly.

Some are treating this as new but we saw that in the original document release in 2021.

Ralph proposed to use commercial vendors to synthesize the genome. BioLab is a Canadian company

From Ralphs 2006 paper

“It is conceivable that a bioterrorist could order genome portions from various synthesis facilities distributed in different countries throughout the world and then assemble an infectious genome without ever having access to the virus.

To our knowledge, no international regulatory group reviews the body of synthetic DNAs ordered globally to determine if a highly pathogenic recombinant virus genome is being constructed.”

Anyone think the FBI checked all these vendors and labs to see if anyone synthesized parts of Sars-Cov-2 in 2019?

Anyways, why try and vaccinate Bats in remote bat caves when you can vaccinate the troops with a Live Attenuated Virus (LAV) Vaccine?.

DEFUSE laid out how to develop the Virus using consensus sequences.

While I cant prove this is what happened, I think this part went ahead using sequences from WIV and perhaps Naval Medical Research Center (NMRC ) from their 2017 bat sampling project in Laos that never released a single coronavirus sequence. The cave was located near the cave in which the infamous BANAL Sequences were obtained, allegedly in 2020, which were closest viruses to Sars-Cov-2

After running the tests, Ralph would have recognized their pandemic potential and notified the funders. Being concerned the virus could not be sufficiently attenuated, and not wanting to risk reversion to virulence if this was attempted, they wisely would have called off the LAV Vaccine Project, and decided to do something that was proposed with DEFUSE, which is to vaccinate (humans not bats) with only the spike protein or parts of the spike (RBD).

https://pete843.substack.com/p/more-defuse-documents-sneak-in-a

It was not a self spreading bat vaccine, but a live attenuated virus (LAV) vaccine designed for humans. Much like the Measles Vaccine. A live virus vaccine for bats would not transmit in humans because with bats coronavirus infects and replicates in the gastrointestinal tract and not the respiratory tract like humans, and their cell receptors and immune system differ, yet Sars-Cov-2 was well adopted to infect and replicate in human lung cells and does not infect and replicate very well in the proposed vaccine target (horseshoe bats)

Somewhere along the line, perhaps someone thought it might be a good idea to use the live virus vaccine to create a pandemic. We can only speculate on who that someone (plural) is but it was someone who had motive, opportunity and means.

IC-COVID-Prophecy-Baric

Many look to the Intelligence Community (IC) for answers to COVID Origins. However, what if SARS-Cov-2 was created by the Military Intelligence Complex (MIC) for Operation COVID.?

This possibility is something few care to contemplate, much like the idea of 9/11 being an inside job, because it is too terrifying to consider.

While there is no direct evidence that this is so, they would have the means and opportunity and the Elites controlling them have the nefarious motivation.

I mean, if we really do believe the Elites or Epstein Class are Evil, certainly they should be considered suspects. After all, COVID and its aftermath helped the billionaires to get much richer,

DEFUSE is a Rabbit Hole Deflecting you from seeing the Blobs Manhattan Project that is creating the WHO’s “One Health” Super Weapon that will essentially Weaponize (GOF) Pathogenic Natural Viruses so as to create a Permanent Health Security Crisis to justify the imposition of a Global Green Fascism.

Boy, that was a Mouthful.

Operation COVID was a successful Live Exercise, demonstrating proof of concept, the first of many man made Epidemics and Pandemics

OPERATION COVID

Ralph Baric is literally the Godfather of Coronavirus Research , for over 30 years now

2018 paper by Baric

“Evaluation of a recombination-resistant coronavirus as a broadly applicable, rapidly implementable vaccine platform”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-018-0175-7.pdf

2006 paper by Baric

Will synthetic or recombinant bioweapons be developed for BW use? If the main purpose is to kill and inspire fear in human populations, natural source pathogens likely provide a more reliable source of starting material......

If notoriety, fear and directing foreign government policies are principle objectives, then the release and subsequent discovery of a synthetically derived virus bioweapon garner tremendous media coverage, inspire fear and terrorize human populations and direct severe pressure on government officials to respond in predicted ways.

https://www.jcvi.org/sites/default/files/assets/projects/synthetic-genomics-options-for-governance/Baric-Synthetic-Viral-Genomics.pdf

Ralph of course like Daszak and Fauci became convenient scapegoats. Fauci of course was pardoned while Daszak/Baric only lost funding.

Prophecy

Most people have never heard of this DARPA program, that is now defunct or more likely moved elsewhere

2009-Prophecy was a program created by Michael Callahan at DARPA. It sought to “transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive” through algorithmic programming techniques. In layman’s terms, the program proposed that “viral mutations and outbreaks” could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.

They wanted to develop novel lab-based methods to reproduce “virus-host interactions,” in different environments and test how they adapt and change under diverse conditions.

In other words they wanted to accelerate natural evolution for Predictive Purposes so they could intervene and Preempt mutations in viruses that would have Pandemic Potential.

Alternatively, and left unsaid, they could accelerate the evolution of a virus by hundreds of years to evolve into a Pandemic Virus in the lab by letting nature (host immune system) and the virus do the heavy lifting (designing a full length virus that works as you want it to work is probably beyond even Ralph Baric)

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/darpa-wants-to-predict-deadly-pathogens-with-prophecy/

https://www.darpa.mil/program/prophecy-pathogen-defeat

And last but not least, I will give you a glimpse of what Ralph Baric told a bunch of Scientists in China months before COVID

I believe Prophecy or its offshoot may have been used to create the backbone for Sars-Cov-2 and Baric developed the know how and techniques to fine tune its stability, virulence and attenuate it so it would not be too harmful to younger and healthy people.

2019 January , Ralph Baric gave a talk in Harbin, China in a conference talking about the complexity of deliberate design of viruses. He also gave a talk on H5N1 on behalf of USDA

“Studies to alter pathogen properties of viruses can use several approaches, including selection pressure to drive evolution as well as deliberate design. Potential opportunities might include building chimeric viruses with altered structures for the receptor binding for viral entry, or those that incorporate changes to other viral determinants or that modulate host-pathogen interactions. Dr Baric noted the example of adding the spike protein from a mouse coronavirus to a bat coronavirus , which can produce a strain more virulent in mice. But he cautioned, that a combination of techniques, including selection pressure from passaging in mice <humans?>is generally needed to generate virulence in a host…..

Dr. Baric also noted that predictive modeling of protein interfaces and the use of such models for structure-guided virus design has recently improved, providing advancing capabilities for affecting host-virus interactions and altering antigenic properties. Similarly, he noted that the “shopping list” of virulence determinants continues to grow as more is learned about host-virus interfaces and how they evolve as viruses move through different species.

As examples of both potential opportunities and ongoing barriers to effective engineering of viral properties, Dr. Baric referenced studies to develop a self-replicating alphavirus containing HIV sequences for use as an HIV vaccine, an approach that was abandoned when the virus was too pathogenic in mice. He also noted the barrier provided by a glycosylation site that makes it relatively easy to create mouse-adapted SARS strains but not mouse-adapted MERS. And the use of newer tools such as CRISPR/Cas-based gene editing to create a mouse model by introducing the human virus binding receptor domain into the mouse.

On the other hand, creating a virus that is super-adapted to a particular host can actually result in an attenuation of virulence, if the virus interacts overly strongly with a cellular receptor. This shows the complexity of deliberate design as well as a potential sweet spot for pathogenicity.

Other challenges to deliberate design include the fact that a large number of virus-host protein interactions occur, and changing one can have unexpected effects across the interaction networks as virus-host interactions are usually a “highly coordinated co-evolved process.” Viral packaging constraints, the effects of host genetic variation on disease severity, and other factors all add to the complexity and confound the utility of predictive design models.”

https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/US-China-dialogues-report.pdf

First of all, lets be clear yet again what Sars-Cov-2 really is.

Its a low pathogenic virus that is pretty harmless to children and most healthy young adults, although it can present problems to the elderly.

Baric: Could be … you know, we almost have 1 billion elderly on the planet above 60, and coronaviruses like to replicate in old people.

https://alumni.unc.edu/news/ralph-baric-on-the-front-lines-of-coronavirus-for-three-decades/

The Man From DARPA In Wuhan

Dr Michael Callahan, was in China in January 2020 as reports of a new virus broke. Dr Robert Malone, says Callahan rang him from China on January 4, 2020. It is unclear when he first arrived or the details of the call. Some reports said he told Malone he had been treating hundreds of patients.

As reported by Raul Diego after studying data from over 6,000 patient records from Wuhan, Callahan reportedly detected a pattern that could point to a possible treatment using a low-cost and widely available ingredient of an “over-the-counter histamine-2 receptor antagonist called Famotidine”, more commonly known as the brand name Pepcid.

Dr. Robert Malone was working alongside U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) consultants as part of DOMANE to carry out supercomputer-based analyses to identify existing FDA-approved drugs that may be useful against various viruses. After the sequence of the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 was published on January 10, their analyses indicated famotidine turned out to be the “most attractive combination of safety, cost and pharmaceutical characteristics“.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/07/investigative-re

Curiously DOMANE was established only a month before on December 11,2019

On January 8, a Thai woman returning from Wuhan was “pulled aside” at the airport over symptoms of a runny nose, sore throat and high temperature. “Supaporn Wacharapluesadee’s team”, as claimed, discovered that the woman was infected with a “new coronavirus”.

Dr. Wacharapluesadee herself had allegedly succeeded in “partially” decoding the genetic sequence of the virus by the following day and reported it to the Thai government.

Callahans Prophecy working as intended while Callahan is in China?

January 17, 2020 Callahan was in Wuhan before the World Health Organization (WHO) made its preliminary field visit on January 20-21. Callahan was the source of US reports that China’s infection numbers were under-reported.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/covid-19-origin-first-shots-excerpt-1267694/

According to Rolling Stones article Callahan was in Nanjing first and did not go to Wuhan until sometime before January 22 (January 17?) right before the Lockdown

He went to Wuhan anyway and hunkered down in a guest house, waiting to get the word from his friends. “They had to check in to make sure things were safe for me.”

On Jan. 22, Callahan slipped on medical scrubs and donned an N95 mask and a pair of goggles to pass through the entrance of the Wuhan Central Hospital, a boot-shaped glass building rising up from the city’s empty streets. There, his colleagues registered him as a “guest clinical educator,” a title that would allow him into the wards as an observer. The next day, the city locked down. Callahan had just made it into the white-hot center ofthe outbreak.

Then he was smuggled out by boat and returned to Nanjing

All told, Callahan spent almost a week on the ground helping his colleagues keep the hospital functioning, learning about the virus’s toll on the human body, and taking note of what drugs doctors were throwing at the virus. Chinese officials were planning to tighten Wuhan’s quarantine measures, banning residents even from stepping out to buy food.

Callahan slipped across the river by boat — “the black-market way” — and returned to Nanjing, where he and his colleagues had a video link with the ICU units in two hospitals in Wuhan and could provide advice and track patient outcomes. Callahan knew he needed to report what he was seeing to his friends in the U.S. government.

Its unclear why he went to Nanjing in the first place (to escape the Boston weather as stated in the article?) or if he had a video link or other contact with Wuhan hospitals

Winter in Nanjing is generally from November to February, with the coldest month falling in January when the average temperature is around 2.4 degrees Celsius

On leaving China, Callahan returned to Washington to brief federal officials and then went directly to work as a “special adviser” to Robert Kadlec, managing the government’s response to the coronavirus.

On February 4, Kadlec dispatched to Japan Callahan to manage the evacuation of Americans from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. It had been quarantined at Yokohama after ten passengers were reported sick with Covid. Callahan, joined by Dr Lawler, prevented two officials of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from boarding the ship with them.

During the second week of quarantine, the pair extended testing to passengers who weren’t sick and were soon reporting back to their superiors at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) that Covid was everywhere.

However the Japanese report on the Diamond Princess outbreak belies this: 3,618 of the 3,711 occupants were tested and 410 of the 696 positive cases were people with no symptoms. Only 13 passengers, almost all in their 70s or 80s, died of Covid.

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-us-biowarfare-project-which-caused-the-covid-19-debacle-part-6/

Cant find much information about Callahan recently. The DARPA Spook has gone dark.

Here I laid out the timeline of the rollout of what I believe to be Operation COVID.

https://open.substack.com/pub/pete843/p/a-covid-timeline

I’ll end it here

EndCovid Origins

On February 28th before the US and Israel launched a Pearl Harbor like surprise attack on Iran in the middle of negotiations that were by all accounts making great progress, who could imagine the US contemplating signing such a MOU 3 1/2 months later?

Not me.

While the US and Israel caused a lot of damage to Iran, killing thousands of civilians and decapitating much of its leadership, it did not force regime change or surrender, and Iran punched back not just at Israel and US assets but those of its Gulf State partners

There was no quick win and Iran used a weapon it had never needed to use before, it closed the Strait of Hormuz.

One would think in such a War the US could outlast Iran and with a Shock and Awe Campaign of missiles and bombs dropped on them that Iran would soon surrender or just fracture in the chaos.

But Iran punched back and refused to fold. The problem is we just don’t have the industrial capacity to wage a long intense war against an enemy that does not jump out of the sand and surrender right away and has missiles and drones that can sting to boot. Insufficient stockpiles of weapons and missile interceptors coupled with long production and delivery times prevents this. You can bet China has taken note.

With Strategic Reserve drawdowns and Trumps market manipulating tactics the economic effects have been somewhat muted thus far, the Reserves are about to hit its effective bottom in 3-8 weeks (which is when only 270 -300 million barrels of sludge are remaining) . Having gas prices go vertical in September ahead of midterms is not an ideal situation even if their blatant election rigging goes according to plan.

So what about this MOU? Despite JD Vance trying to put lipstick on a Pig, this plan looks so politically piggy they dare not release it in print.

We did see something from Iran but we cant rely on that.

Happily the Administration read the deal out loud, and as expected the MOU is simply an agreement to reach a final agreement.

The way I read the transcript, the only thing agreed now is ceasefire, opening the straight now w/o tolls, fully ending blockade on Iran within 30 days and issuing waivers for Iran oil exports. Everything else is just carrots offered to Iran that are pending a final deal that is unlikely to be reached.

The carrots are the piggy parts of the deal. Promises to end sanctions, $300 billion reconstruction fund, returning assets pending a final deal. The piggy parts of the deal (understanding) are unlikely to be realized. Stop whining.

Iran also reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. Trump will argue this pledge is a win since Iran is agreeing it will never have a nuclear weapon but Iran already made this pledge when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

The way I see it is Trump is just buying time for 60 days, perhaps extendable past the midterms.

Thats fine with me.

Nothing can take back the terrible decision to attack Iran in the first place, a War the Pentagon is using to request an additional $200 billion and may cost the global economy $2.2 trillion and an estimated 0.3 percent drag on the US gross domestic product (GDP) , and has the Fed considering rate increases rather than rate cuts.

Might be the stupidest thing any President has done. The Piggy MOU works as damage control, no need to waste lipstick on the Pig.

End

Sazan was once considered part of the Ionian Islands. After the Napoleonic Wars, it was administered together with the Ionian Islands under British protection, and when the Ionian Islands were ceded to Greece in 1864, Sazan was technically included in that transfer. Greece never firmly established control, however, and the island’s sovereignty became disputed before eventually passing to Italy and then to Albania after World War II.

150 miles south is another Ionian Island called Skorpios Island off Greece that Epstein was interested in buying in 2012

In April 2013, Ekaterina Rybolovleva, the 24-year-old daughter of Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, bought a group of companies from Athina Onassis for $153 million from her trust. The assets included a long term lease to Skorpios and its smaller islet, Sparti. Beginning in October 2018 and with a completion date of 2020, Rybolovleva began developing a 10,000 square metres (110,000 sq ft) luxury resort on Skorpios for a total investment estimated at €184 million

Dmitry Rybolovlev, is the Russian Oligarch that bought a Palm Beach property from Donald Trump for $95 million in 2008. This is the same property Trump outbid Epstein for that is the reason they fell out.

Through Kushners firm Affinity Partners they are partnering with with Aman Resorts. Aman is famous for hiring master architects who integrate buildings directly into the natural topography Negotiations with Albania began in 2021 but approval did not come until 2 months after Trump won the Election in 2024.

What most don’t know is that it’s an Aman Resorts is owned by Russian Oligarch Vladislav Doronin who was engaged to Ghislaine’s best friend Naomi Campbell.

On 31 December 2010 Vladimir Putin in his decree N2502-p has awarded Vladislav Doronin with a Certificate of Merit of the Government of Russian Federation and expressed to him the gratitude of the Government of the Russian Federation for Doronin’s role in organizing the charity event in support of the disappearing tiger species, which was attended by Putin and Leonardo DiCaprio.

In 2010 Doronin won “Businessman of the Year” award in Russia. The award ceremony took place on 25 February 2010 in the Moscow Kremlin

As a side note Doronin hired former FBI agent Charles McGonigal as VP of worldwide security.

Here is what wikipedia has to say about McGonigal

In September 2018, McGonigal was hired as a vice-president at Brookfield Properties.

In 2018, Brookfield Asset Management signed a 99 year lease for 667 Fifth Avenue a Manhattan office tower owned by Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm, Kushner Companies. The deal, worth $1.1 billion, was paid upfront, which is highly unusual—if not, unprecedented—in these transactions. However, at the time, Kushner Companies was struggling with $1.2 billion in deb

In the spring of 2022, McGonigal was hired as the global head of security for Aman Resorts. McGonigal’s hiring was done through a very obscure process and raised many eyebrows there, according to Aman staffers, as the previous director of corporate security had been reassigned for no apparent reason, and McGonigal continued to be retained by the company even after news first surfaced that he was under investigation

In January 2023, McGonigal was arrested and indicted on federal charges of money laundering, making false statements in mandatory disclosures to the FBI, violating U.S. sanctions on Russia, and other counts. The indictment alleged that McGonigal worked with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whom McGonigal had investigated as part of the FBI’s Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Deripaska tasked McGonigal with investigating one of Deripaska’s rivals. McGonigal used shell companies to conduct his business with Deripaska.

According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, Deripaska is an agent of Vladimir Putin. Deripaska played a key role in financing Putin’s efforts to take over Ukraine from within via a political operation directed by Paul Manafort that put Putin surrogate Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine presidency in 2010.

McGonigal was separately indicted for allegedly accepting payments amounting to more than US$225,000 from a former Albanian intelligence employee and acting to advance that person’s interests. Days after his arrest, McGonigal was released on $500,000 bond after pleading not guilty.

The FBI’s investigation into McGonigal reportedly began sometime in 2018, after McGonigal was seen meeting with a Russian contact who was under surveillance by British authorities.

On August 15, 2023, McGonigal pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and money laundering in connection with a 2021 agreement to provide services to Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

In December 2023, McGonigal was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to working for Deripaska.

In February 2024, McGonigal was sentenced to an additional 28 months in prison for concealing the payments he received from Agron Neza, a former Albanian intelligence employee.

Interesting

Lets focus on Doronin and who he is connected to. Vladislav Doronin is a Russian-born billionaire (with Swiss/Swedish ties) who built his fortune in commodities trading and real estate. He founded Capital Group in Russia and later acquired control of the luxury Aman Resorts chain.

He was in a long-term relationship with Naomi Campbell who is the British supermodel (roughly 2008–2010s; they had public disputes later) and connected to Epstein

Marc Rich was the controversial commodities trader and fugitive (pardoned by Bill Clinton) who mentored or employed Doronin early in his career.

Doronin worked for Marc Rich + Co. in Switzerland (Geneva/Zug) in the mid-1980s as a young commodities trader after leaving Russia. He later founded Capital Group in Moscow (1991), which initially traded metals/oil and had Marc Rich as an investor and financier into the early 2000s. Doronin has spoken positively of Rich as a mentor who provided advice and contacts.

Epstein and Campbell knew each other for years (introduced via her ex Flavio Briatore). Campbell appears in Epstein’s contact book, flight logs, and photos with him/Ghislaine Maxwell. Post-2008 conviction, their contact continued.

Epstein was also connected to both Marc Rich and Doronin. Both are in the Epstein Emails although there are not many emails. Epstein did not use email until the early 2000’s so much of his communications in his early years, 80’s-90’s this is not recorded and he was smart enough not to say all that much when he did use email, especially post-conviction.

Perhaps the most interesting connection, albeit only indirectly through Marc Rich was illuminated by a guy named James Hatt as discovered in the Epstein Files.

James Hatt was a telecom executive, but its likely he was working for the intelligence service. He was posted most of the time to the Soviet Union, largely Latvia, to try and privatize telecoms. And he comes forward in 2020 to the FBI

Hatt is no light weight and had direct involvement in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. According to the Lenox library biography:

• he negotiated Soviet-European communications agreements during the Mikhail Gorbachev era,

• worked across Russia during the Boris Yeltsin years,

• and met Putin in St. Petersburg in 1990 when Putin worked for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.

Recently Chris Hedges interviewed investigative journalist Moe Tkacik who came across the James Hatt interview

Moe Tkacik :He says, number one, basically that, under the advice of his father, Kevin had appointed Jeffrey Epstein to sort of take care of the family’s money in the event of an emergency. And so, they never found the money that was missing from the Daily Mirror. What they did have was hundreds of shell companies, most based in Liechtenstein, that they were sort of cycling through. There were bankruptcy examinations, but maybe half the money was found, but a lot of it just sort of went missing.

And what this guy says is that they had sort of put the money into the coffers of a Vienna-based mobster named Grigory Luchansky. Luchansky was born in Georgia, spent a lot of his time in Latvia. There was a ton of money laundering going on in Latvia at the time, a very critical port for illicit oil sales. So, a lot of money is funneling through Latvia and this guy Luchansky is sort of like the boss, the main mob boss of Latvia. He becomes very good friends with this telecom executive because he’s trying to privatize telecoms in Latvia. So, he has to pay him off. He refers to him as something called a ‘roof’, which is like the network of kind of the extortion ring that surrounded any of the Russian state-owned enterprises.

You’d have to pay these guys off in order to successfully privatize it. So, Luchansky is this kind of mobster, he’s based in Vienna, spends a lot of time in Latvia, and Epstein is laundering money for him and bringing back some of it to Ghislaine Maxwell. And Epstein is getting a lot of his money to kind of keep the Maxwell family afloat. Apparently, according to this document, he’s getting it out of the New York Daily News, which is, of course, the newspaper that Maxwell owned, had just purchased when he died.

He had just purchased it in early 1991 after this horrible strike. And in bankruptcy court, the newspaper is sold to Mort Zuckerman, who is a Montreal-born man about town, a recent ex-boyfriend at that point of Gloria Steinem, and he owns US News and World Report, and at that point the Atlantic Monthly…….

And he just says so much money was coming out of the Daily News and distributing it to Ghislaine and the rest of the nine, I think…

Chris Hedges: Through Epstein, was it?

Moe Tkacik: Epstein was the one who was doing that. Now, Epstein was also extremely good friends with Mort Zuckerman.

Moe Tkacik: Yeah, so one thing that was really striking about, again, going back to that British intelligence officer, telecom guy, was that this gentleman that he mentions, Gregory Luchansky, was like an obsession of the CIA. William Saphire wrote a column about him in 1995. In the 90s, there was a lot of fear about what was going to happen to Russia. I remember the fear of Zhirinovsky, what all of this chaos that we had done so much to unleash and to worsen was going to wreak.

So, the big thing on Luchansky was that he was suspected and he showed up at a bunch of DNC – he gets a meeting with Clinton that supposedly Ghislaine organizes. And Ghislaine goes to work as his pimp essentially. As this guy Luchansky’s pimp. She was working for Luchansky. But in the in the real hawkish stories about this guy, and he was one of a large parade of very shady foreign donors to the DNC and to Clinton during the mid-90s. He belonged to that sort of parade, the Charlie Tree, you know, those guys.

But they were saying that he was suspected of trafficking nuclear materials to Iran. But this is one of the things that was just so striking to read and to understand because that’s the other thing is that he was a business partner of Mark Rich, who was famously pardoned by Clinton on his last day in office and Mark Rich was another one of these guys who sold Iranian oil. He didn’t care who he was taking money from. He was completely unideological, a Zionist, right? But he did lots of deals with Iran and that was one of the reasons that he actually was originally indicted.

https://braveneweurope.com/moe-tkacik-chris-hedges-jeffrey-epstein-the-russian-mob-the-hidden-assets-of-the-maxwells

Hedges didn’t seem interested in pursuing this for some reason, but at least someone is looking at the Hatt interview.

Anyways, the documented connections between Vladislav Doronin and Grigori (or Grigory/Grigori) Luchansky (also spelled Loutchansky) centered on Marc Rich and overlapping post-Soviet commodities trading networks in the 1990s rather than direct partnerships.

Grigori Luchansky (born 1945) is a Latvian-born Russian-Israeli businessman best known as the founder of the Vienna-based Nordex group (established around 1989–1990). He has long been accused by Western authorities and media of ties to Russian organized crime, money laundering, arms/nuclear material smuggling allegations, and KGB-era networks for moving commodities and hard currency out of the collapsing Soviet Union. He has strongly denied these claims, won some libel suits, and was never convicted in major cases.

Luchansky and Nordex were also deeply involved in similar post-Soviet commodity trading (oil, metals, etc.) and had reported business ties or overlaps with Marc Rich’s network. Rich reportedly helped set up or had links to Nordex according to some Italian investigations into Russian mafia money laundering (Rich denied direct involvement).

Doronin’s recent public profile emphasizes legitimate real estate and hospitality, while distancing from Russian operations post-2014. Luchansky remains a more controversial figure tied to 1990s scandals.

Luchansky (via his Nordex group) had reported business and social ties to the Maxwells in the 1990s. Kevin and Ian Maxwell were filmed/meeting with him in Vienna. Ghislaine and/or her brothers allegedly helped arrange Luchansky’s 1995 meeting with President Bill Clinton at a DNC-related event and acted as “fixers” (introductions to Wall Street, etc.).

As discussed James Hatt (a telecom/business associate of the Maxwells) provided information in 2020 proffer calls and FBI interviews describing interactions involving Kevin Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, and Grigory Luchansky. These covered late 1980s–early 2000s international financial dealings, movement of funds, and procurement of young men/women for entertaining foreign businessmen (including references to Luchansky’s circle).

Hatt described Luchansky/Nordex as providing an “insurance policy” for business ventures in the chaotic post-Soviet era, with Nordex linked to Marc Rich (Doronin’s early mentor).

Luchansky/Nordex was long scrutinized by Western intelligence (CIA obsession noted) for alleged organized crime, money laundering, arms trafficking, and KGB-era fund transfers out of the USSR. Epstein’s broader Russia/post-Soviet overlaps (visits, officials) fit this milieu.

So Luchansky seems a bit of a dead end in linking to Kushner or Doronin, so I looked at some of the Epstein Emails with Doronin. Nothing really significant. He helped Epstein get a visa for Russia in 2010 but no indication Epstein travelled to Russia.

This email has Epstein likening Doronin to Donald Trump which I thought was amusing

Thats all I got.

End

So this post will be a 2 in 1 kind of deal since there is no relationship between the 2 topics except the Mad King is in charge of both.

Lets start with the New World Screwworms that have returned to the US after 60 years. Nasty flesh eating buggers. How did we let it back in? ChatGBT /Grok assisted on this post.

The New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax) is one of the most economically destructive livestock parasites ever encountered in the Americas. Unlike ordinary maggots, which feed on dead tissue, screwworm larvae feed on living flesh. Female flies lay eggs in wounds, navels of newborn animals, or natural body openings. The larvae hatch and burrow deeper into living tissue, enlarging the wound and potentially killing the animal if untreated. Cattle are particularly vulnerable, but horses, sheep, goats, deer, pets, wildlife, and occasionally humans can be affected.

Before eradication, screwworm cost U.S. ranchers enormous losses. Infested animals often required repeated treatment, and mortality could be high. The pest was considered one of the most damaging livestock parasites in North America.

The United States eliminated screwworm in 1966 using one of the most successful biological-control programs ever implemented: the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). Millions of sterilized male flies were released. Female screwworms generally mate only once, so mating with a sterile male produces no offspring. Over time the population collapses.

After eradication from the U.S., Mexico, and most of Central America, the U.S. and Panama maintained a permanent containment program near the Darien Gap, the jungle region between Panama and Colombia. Sterile flies were continuously released there, creating a biological barrier that prevented screwworm populations in South America from moving north. This strategy worked for decades.

Since 2023–2024, screwworm has been moving north again through Central America and Mexico. USDA reports show detections progressively advancing northward in Mexico, including Veracruz, Oaxaca, and later Nuevo León, bringing the parasite increasingly close to the U.S. border.

The U.S. response was essentially a layered defense system.

Fight the outbreak in Mexico rather than Texas

USDA’s primary goal is to eradicate screwworm as far south as possible before it reaches the United States.

This includes 1) funding expansion of sterile-fly production in Mexico. 2) Providing traps, lures, technical support, and surveillance assistance. 3) Working directly with Mexican animal-health authorities.

Massive sterile-fly releases

The sterile-fly program remains the cornerstone of control.

USDA reported that More than 100 million sterile flies per week already being produced in Panama. Additional Mexican production capacity being developed. New dispersal facilities built in Texas to support aerial releases over northern Mexico.

The strategy is identical to the one that eradicated screwworm decades ago: overwhelm wild populations with sterile males until reproduction collapses.

Livestock import restrictions

When screwworm advanced northward in Mexico, the U.S. suspended imports of certain live livestock through southern border ports in November 2024. USDA explicitly cited the pest’s movement toward the U.S. as the reason. I will come back to this later.

USDA has established enhanced:

• Trapping networks

• Monitoring programs

• Reporting requirements

• Coordination with border agencies and state animal-health officials

The idea is to detect any introduction before it becomes established.

Quarantines and rapid response

When a case is detected, authorities establish infested zones, movement controls, intensive inspections and additional sterile-fly releases

Following the recent Texas detection, officials established a quarantine area and increased surveillance around the affected location.

In June 2026, USDA confirmed New World screwworm in a calf in Zavala County, Texas—the first confirmed U.S. livestock detection in decades. Federal and Texas officials immediately began containment measures including quarantines, trapping, surveillance, and sterile-fly releases.

Could it spread across the southern U.S.?

Before eradication, screwworm was established across much of the American South.

The major question now is whether modern containment efforts can eliminate these new incursions before breeding populations become established. The U.S. has successfully done this before, but the challenge is maintaining enough sterile-fly production and surveillance to stay ahead of the parasite’s spread.

According to this we don’t have enough flies

For decades, the U.S. and Panama jointly funded the sterile-fly facility at Pacora, Panama through the binational commission COPEG. The facility continuously produced sterile flies to maintain the biological barrier near the Darién Gap. Production never stopped, but it was essentially a maintenance operation designed to keep screwworm confined to South America.

Once screwworm was detected moving north through Central America and into Mexico, USDA began expanding capacity. They announced a $21 million investment to convert a facility in Metapa, Mexico into a sterile-fly production plant. The goal was to add 60–100 million sterile flies per week on top of the roughly 100 million per week already produced in Panama.

After the threat reached northern Mexico in July 2025 USDA announced:

• An $8.5 million dispersal facility in South Texas.

• Construction of a U.S.-based sterile-fly production facility in Edinburg, Texas.

• Plans for that facility to eventually produce up to 300 million sterile flies per week, making it the first U.S.-based production center in decades.

USDA described the Texas facility as a strategic effort to reduce dependence on the single Panamanian facility and to provide enough capacity to push the screwworm population back south.

Critics—including some ranchers and Texas officials—argue that production capacity should have been expanded sooner and that the response accelerated only after the threat was already approaching Texas.

Producing sterile screwworms at scale is a specialized industrial-biological process:

1. Rear hundreds of millions of flies.

2. Sterilize them without reducing competitiveness.

3. Transport them alive.

4. Release them over huge areas by air.

5. Maintain production week after week.

That infrastructure largely disappeared in the United States after eradication because it wasn’t needed for decades. Much of the recent spending is therefore not just buying more flies—it’s rebuilding an entire eradication system that had been scaled down after the success of the original campaign.

How could this happen? In 2023, cases surged in Panama and Costa Rica — and then began to spread steadily northward through Mexico.

Why that happened is difficult to say but if not enough insects are released, if the mass-produced sterile populations diverge too far from wild populations, or if the production process makes the sterile males less fit than wild males then any of these could explain it.

Once the fly population began surging, the insects probably did not simply wing their way to the United States, experts said. Instead, they most likely hitched rides on infested livestock. “These flies typically move great distances because humans move animals,” Ms. Rollins said at the briefing.

From January to June 2025, more than 2,100 employees left the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which detects outbreaks, according to a watchdog report. In congressional testimony on Thursday, Ms. Rollins said staffing reductions did not affect the agency’s “ability to react and to research,” but she did not specify whether any scientists or inspectors working on screwworm response had left the agency.

Linda Qiu contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/science/new-world-screwworm-explainer.html

As indicated earlier, the border was closed to livestock at the Southern Border in November 2024. Why are cases happening now?

We reopened the border to live cattle on February 1 2025 before closing them again on May 11,2025 when news of the spread to Northern Mexico occurred . Those 100 days opened the door for livestock from infected areas, and more importantly the hoard of flies that travel with the livestock. While we may inspect the livestock but we don’t inspect the flies

With the US now breached, production capacity of sterile flies is not adequate to contain it, and you don’t just scale up overnight. It takes time. This should have been a budget priority early in 2025 , perhaps earlier, but Trumps been too busy starting trade wars and real wars and trashing the White House

Timeline

- November 2024: after an initial NWS detection in southern Mexico there was a suspension of live cattle, bison, and horse imports through southern border ports of entry from Mexico,

- February 1, 2025: Imports resumed after agreements on enhanced pre-clearance inspections and protocols between the U.S. and Mexico.

- May 11, 2025: The border was closed again due to further northward advancement of NWS. The suspension was set to continue on a month-by-month basis until containment improved.

- July 2025: A phased reopening was attempted (starting with one port in Douglas, Arizona), but it was quickly halted and the border closed again after new NWS cases were detected farther north.

As of mid-2026, livestock trade through U.S. southern border ports remains closed due to ongoing NWS concerns in Mexico.

Strategic Reserve Oil Loans

I decided to look into how much money we were making releasing our Strategic Oil Reserves into the market and was surprised to learn we were loaning it out. In other words nobody was paying us up front. In return, we expect it to be returned plus an additional 25% of Oil between November 2026 and end of 2028.

This is different than what Biden did

The Biden administration’s 2022 emergency drawdown sold 180 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in response to the energy shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to the Department of Energy’s 2022 report to Congress, those sales generated nearly $17 billion in revenue.

The administration later repurchased some oil at lower prices. The Department of Energy has argued that selling around $95/bbl and repurchasing around $77/bbl produced a gain for taxpayers. Reuters reported DOE’s estimate of about $3.5 billion in savings/profit from the sell-high, buy-lower strategy.

According to Energy Secretary Chris Wright:

• About 133 million barrels have been loaned from the SPR so far.

• Borrowers must repay with premiums of up to 24–25%.

• The government expects to receive about 40 million additional barrels beyond what it loaned out.

• Wright stated that the arrangement is being done at “no cost to taxpayers” and that the government is “not selling any barrels of oil” but rather trading them.

So, unlike the 2022 Biden release that generated roughly $17 billion in cash revenue, the 2026 program’s direct cash proceeds appear to be essentially zero, because it is structured as a loan/exchange program rather than a sale. The government’s “return” is the extra oil it receives back later, not cash.

The first tranche (45.2 million barrels) went to a group dominated by major refiners and commodity traders, including BP, Marathon, Shell, Gunvor, Trafigura, Vitol, Mercuria, and Energy Transfer.

The second tranche (8.48 million barrels) specifically named:

• Gunvor USA

• Phillips 66

• Trafigura Trading

• Macquarie Commodities Trading.

The third tranche (26.03 million barrels) included:

• BP Products North America

• ExxonMobil Oil Corp.

• Marathon Petroleum

• six additional companies not identified in the Reuters summary.

Based on the names that recur across multiple tranches and the size of their refining/trading operations, the most likely largest borrowers are:

1. BP Products North America

2. Marathon Petroleum

3. Shell

4. Gunvor Group

5. Trafigura

However, DOE has not publicly released a table showing the exact number of barrels awarded to each company, so ranking them with certainty is not currently possible from public information.

One thing that stands out is that the borrower list is split between:

• Refiners (Marathon, Phillips 66, Exxon, Shell, BP), which can turn crude into gasoline and diesel; and

• Commodity traders (Vitol, Trafigura, Gunvor, Mercuria, Macquarie), which specialize in moving and financing large crude cargoes globally.

I am not worried much about the refiners paying back the Oil but what happens if Oil Supplies stay low and prices stay high? Will these Commodity Traders be able to pay us back?

Also refineries are getting the Oil for free today, expecting to buy the Oil they have to buy to pay off the loan at pre-War prices. So why are not gasoline prices much lower?

Also, those Commodity Traders are not selling the Oil at Futures Prices, they are selling it at spot prices which is closer to $150/barrel.

But there are risks associated with the loan model

• Bankruptcy of a refiner/trader during stress

• Political or legal renegotiation in extreme market conditions

• Delivery delays if logistics tighten globally

The biggest problem is the Loan Model creates future demand for Oil which should serve to inflate prices for a much longer period, unless the loans are forgiven (wink wink).

I ran this buy ChatGBT in bold

When companies take SPR crude under loan terms:

Today (release phase)

• SPR barrels enter the market

• Private buyers don’t need to source as much crude elsewhere

• That acts like temporary supply increase

• → prices are pushed down or capped

Future (repayment phase)

• Those same companies must:

  • buy crude in the open market, AND

  • return it to the SPR (plus premium)

• That creates artificial demand that is contractually locked in

• → prices are pushed up or supported later

So you’ve correctly identified it:

It’s not free smoothing—it is intertemporal redistribution of price pressure.

Why this matters more than cash sales

A cash SPR sale:

• is a one-time supply shock

• does NOT mechanically create future demand

An SPR loan:

• creates a paired disturbance

  • negative price pressure now

  • positive price pressure later

So instead of:

“one dip”

you get:

“dip now + hump later”

The biggest distortion risk: “stacked repayment demand”

The real concern is not just direction—it’s concentration.

If repayment is clustered (even partially), you can get:

Scenario risk:

• multiple borrowers schedule repayments in the same window

• refiners/traders must source millions of barrels simultaneously

• they are all competing in the same marginal barrels

That can produce:

• localized crude spikes

• contango/backwardation distortions in futures markets

• refinery input cost pressure even if global supply is stable

The amplification channel: futures markets

Oil pricing is heavily forward-looking.

So markets don’t wait for repayment—they price it in:

During loan phase:

Traders anticipate:

• future forced buying

• SPR inventory normalization constraints

So you can get:

• forward curve steepening

• higher deferred prices (2027–2028 contracts rise)

Result:

Even before repayment happens:

the market partially pre-prices the future demand shock

So distortion can occur twice:

• spot suppression

• futures elevation

Why this is different from normal inventory cycles?

Normally:

• refiners manage inventories flexibly

• demand shifts are voluntary

But SPR loans introduce:

• non-discretionary demand

• government-scheduled absorption into storage

That’s closer to:

a “forced restocking program” embedded into private balance sheets

You’re essentially describing a two-phase price distortion mechanism:

• Phase 1 (release): bearish pressure

• Phase 2 (repayment): bullish pressure

The key risk is not that these cancel out—it’s that they:

change the shape of the price curve in a way that traders can anticipate and trade around.

That turns the SPR from a pure emergency buffer into a quasi-market timing instrument, which can unintentionally:

• shift volatility forward in time

• and concentrate it into predictable windows

End ChatGBT

I take issue with the use of predictable here as there are significant unknowns in the future , like if the Strait fully reopens and reaches pre-War levels of Oil transport. If not we might be looking at a prolong period of high Oil Prices compounded by the need for these companies to repay borrowed Oil, or we forgive the loan of 170 million barrels of Oil and lose out on $15-17 billion.

End

Said he would eliminate tax on social security income but only gave a temporary increase in the deduction. The promise to cap interest rated on credit card debt has not materialized. No tax on tips /OT was also a temporary deduction

He also promised to reduce illegal immigration which he has done, but we see no data to support he has rid of us what he claimed were 20 million illegals, or even 1 million, and the tactics by ICE have harmed citizens, lawful residents and those following the laws for asylum application. Tourism has plummeted as a result of ICE tactics and tougher visa requirements.

As for ending Wars and not starting new Wars he has failed miserably as a Peace President. Ukraine-Russia War is still hot. Israel still killing those in Gaza and Lebanon despite a so called peace deal in Gaza with Israel now announcing they will seize 70% of Gazas land. Trump attacked Iran twice , attacked Venezuela and kidnapped their President, blockaded Cuba , threatened to attack Greenland, Oman and Cuba, blows up random fishing boats far from American shores, etc . He also attacked the Houthis , Nigeria, Somalia, but quickly disengaged from the battle with the Houthis when they proved too tough to handle. I am sure I have left something out

Trump also promised to levy massive Tariffs that would make America so rich we might be able to end the income tax. Of course, many of the tariffs were illegal although SCOTUS took its time confirming it. So $160 billion of what was collected is being refunded. But the tariffs were never as massive as promised at its peak never topped $40 billion a month, because Trump knew despite his lies otherwise that tariffs were paid by Americans and not other countries. Plus some of his billionaire friends gave gifts to exempt their products from tariffs.

In the end, sadly, no dividend check for you, just higher prices. The only ones getting a tariff refund are those who raised the prices that you paid. Suckers. Lutnicks sons bought the rights to tariff refunds from a number of importers knowing they were illegal for 20 cents in the dollar.

And whatever happened to those lower drug prices

Total U.S. prescription drug spending rose 12.7% in 2025 to $915 billion, one of the fastest growth rates in two decades, outpacing increases in both overall healthcare spending and the broader economy.

The ASHP report projects 2026 spending will exceed $1 trillion, with overall growth forecast at 10 to 12%

https://www.pharmexec.com/view/us-prescription-drug-spending-set-exceed-trillion-2026-report

Lets get to the economy, 1st Q GDP 1.6%, following an anemic 2.2% GDP in 2025 that in turn followed 2.8% in Bidens last year in 2024. This is despite the AI/Data Center Boom along with rising stock prices which fuel spending by the top 10% who account for 50% of discretionary or excess spending growth. Together this accounts for much of the GDP Growth which means the economy on Main St is not growing much if at all. Might even be shrinking since BLS employment data showing 1 million fewer people are working compared to last year despite 1.8 million population growth (1.3 million of which were immigrants as of July 2025)

Meanwhile, inflation in April hit 3.8% (and ) following March 3.3% , and thats understated by about 1% for the middle class and elderly. Bidens last full month in office had us at 2.9% inflation that Trump said was too high

The War President said he doesn’t think about Americans finances anymore. I guess $4.50 a gallon for gas isn’t as big a problem as $5 for a dozen egg. Pretty sure most Americans gasoline spending dwarfs that which they spend on eggs. America First has been replaced by Israel First.

But Trumps faithful won’t waiver from worshipping their False Idol, even after he has looted $1.776 billion from their wallets (Treasury) over a sham IRS suit that would make the Mafia blush.

Meanwhile after two successive years at a deficit of 1.8 trillion Trump is on pace to hit a $2 trillion deficit in 2026. Arguably you can say most of fiscal year (ends September 30) 2025 deficit was on Biden

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/federal-budget-deficit-projected-hit-2-trillion-fiscal-year-ranking-among-largest-us-history

Compounding this is higher treasury yields due to Iran War will increase the interest burden on the still increasing national debt that will soon hit $40 trillion

WTF happened to all those DOGE Cuts? There were none, that was all a cover for stealing your data to feed to AI in order to surveil you. Conned again suckers.

To make matters worse, Trumps 2027 budget is expected to have a $500 billion jump in military spending to $1.5 trillion. I remember when a Peace Dividend meant lower military spending, but of course Trump is the War President seeking conquest everywhere, including the homeland.

Meanwhile despite this “Golden Age” more of our 61 million seniors have reportedly joined the 12 million that were already working seniors to make ends meet. No doubt that is spurring the modest increased job growth of late

Mortgage Rates are up to 6.5% which is about where they were (a tad lower) on election day in 2024 (6.7%). Unemployment at 4.3% is also a bit higher than 4.0% when Biden left office.

On the trade deficit front in 2025 it was $901 billion, down a very slight 0.2% so tariffs didn’t exactly work miracles there. The first quarter trade deficit in 2026 was $213.46 billion which is about half of 2025. Sounds great but 1st quarter trade deficit spiked in 2025 as importers rushed to get of tariffs that were scheduled to begin in April 2025, so we probably have to wait for more data to see where we are.

What about Health Insurance? With ACA subsidies gone millions are paying drastically higher premiums with at least 1 million dropping coverage and going uninsured.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/health/100000010851038/health-insurance-affordability.html

As for Employer provided insurance costs (not limited to premiums) an individual person is paying $8,460 on average, a nearly 8% increase over last year and the biggest jump Milliman has tracked in a decade, not counting COVID-era fluctuations. Pharmacy is the fastest-growing cost component of the MMI in 2026, rising 14.8% year-over-year for the average person

https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/2026-milliman-medical-index?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sendto_newslettertest_politics_policy&stream=top

I will leave this with an edited excerpt from TH

https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=302288&post_id=199523786

Americans bought Reagan’s siren song hook, line, and sinker back in 1980. He told us prosperity would “trickle down” if we just abandoned the largely non-profit healthcare system we had nationwide (most states required hospitals and health insurance companies to be nonprofits), the unions that fought for us to have good pay and benefits, enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, free college, and subsidized housing.

Reagan put what’s sometimes called “the neoliberal agenda” (I wrote a book about it: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America”) into place and no president, Republican or Democratic, has fully repealed it. We still have few union members, low taxes on billionaires and corporations, profitized healthcare and education, and stagnant wages for working class people.

All because we believed the Republicans and their billionaire backers and media owners. Consider how they’ve played three generations for fools:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $70 trillion was transferred over 45 years from the bottom 90% to the top .1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss.

Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small group of often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as you can imagine, are generally absent.

One nepo-baby MAGA billionaire now owns, will soon own, or influences, as Bernie Sanders noted: “TikTok, CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, DC Studios, Fandango, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, PlutoTV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT, Warner Bros., and more.”

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Neoliberal Republican Experiment.

Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion; lots of them, in fact, as over 70,000 American factories were torn down or left vacant because their products were moved to China or elsewhere. Over 15 million good-paying jobs went overseas along with those factories.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech.”

Five corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience, and every Zoomer paying attention knows it. It’s why they’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

END