CDC Awards Pfizer $1.24 Billion for COVID Vaccines for Kids and Adults
By Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW | The Defender | June 12, 2026
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recent decision to award Pfizer $1.24 billion for COVID-19 vaccines has renewed debate over the government’s continued investment in mRNA technology.
The contracts, awarded on June 1, include about $735.7 million for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines and nearly $505.3 million for adult doses for fiscal year 2026-2027.
Critics say the funding reflects a continued commitment to vaccines associated with high rates of serious injuries and deaths, and a lack of adequate safety testing and monitoring.
Public health experts argue the investment is necessary to protect vulnerable populations and prepare for future outbreaks.
The latest contracts come as mRNA technology expands beyond COVID-19.
A recent review in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics found that mRNA-based therapeutics were identified in more than 550 registered clinical trials. The authors reported that more than 90% of the projects involved mRNA vaccines and that most products remain in early-stage testing before broader adoption.
‘Unnecessary and often harmful injections’
The procurement of monetary resources signals that federal officials intend to continue investing heavily in mRNA technology despite declining public demand and ongoing controversy over vaccine safety monitoring, critics say.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, told The Defender there was “no scientific justification” or “market demand” for the latest mRNA vaccine funding.
“This raises a serious question concerning how these captured agencies really work,” Tucker said. “We are talking about vast amounts of tax dollars flowing to support unnecessary and often harmful injections.”
“This is $1.24 billion for what is essentially a cold in minor children,” said Children’s Health Defense Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.
Daniel O’Connor, publisher of TrialSite News, which covers global biomedical and clinical research, told The Defender Americans “better start asking the hard questions.”
“If demand is falling, safety questions remain contested and many reporting vaccine injuries say they’ve been left behind, why is Washington committing another $1.24 billion to vaccine procurement instead of first providing a transparent accounting of need, benefit, risk, and responsibility?”
‘COVID-19 has not disappeared’
Public health experts disagreed, saying their support of vaccinations is supporting the prevention of future pandemics.
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, told The Defender that the monetary installments will help stave off another public health crisis because “COVID-19 has not disappeared.”
“While the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, the virus continues to cause significant illness, hospitalizations and deaths each year,” she said. “This investment reflects the reality that vaccines remain one of our most effective tools for preventing severe disease, particularly among those at highest risk. Maintaining access to updated vaccines is an important part of ensuring the country remains prepared for future COVID-19 surges.”
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, said the contracts will ensure “continuing availability of safe and effective COVID vaccines through the next two years.”
“COVID vaccines have repeatedly been demonstrated to provide protection against the most severe manifestations of COVID infection: hospitalization, intensive care unit admission and death,” Schaffner said. “This is particularly applicable to those persons at increased risk of becoming seriously ill: persons age 65 and older, anyone with a chronic medical condition, persons who are immunocompromised and persons who are pregnant.”
However, some studies suggest claims that the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives are based on flawed models and incorrect calculations.
Legality of funding in question
The contracts also raise questions about federal vaccine spending.
Under the CDC’s Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program, the federal government agrees to buy and provide free vaccines through negotiated contracts for eligible children.
Current CDC price schedules list Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines at roughly $69 to $91 per dose, depending on the formula, while Moderna doses range from about $78 to $83.
Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer and expert in mRNA vaccines, however, questioned the legal authority to use federal funding for the Pfizer contracts because the purchase wasn’t approved by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
“Use of VFC funds requires ACIP authorization,” he said. “But there is no ACIP.”
Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued an injunction blocking many of the recent ACIP appointments made under U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The injunction stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) against Kennedy and the U.S, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The AAP accused Kennedy of violating procedures when he fired previous ACIP members and replaced them.
The ruling effectively paralysed ACIP and cast doubt on the legitimacy of its membership structure.
Requests for comment from ACIP went unanswered.
‘We are a long way from reckoning’
The CDC has maintained that authorized COVID-19 vaccines underwent extensive safety review and that the benefits outweigh known risks.
However, during a Capitol Hill meeting this week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) referred to reported COVID-19 vaccine injuries as the “biggest government scandal in my lifetime.”
“What about all the injection-injured?” he said. “Until this government and this administration acknowledge those injuries, acknowledge the harm caused by these injections, and I would say federal health agencies also acknowledge the harm done by childhood vaccines, we are a long way from reckoning.”
In April, Johnson released a report revealing that Biden-era health officials rejected a state-of-the-art statistical tool for detecting COVID-19 vaccine safety signals — and instead deliberately continued using a broken method because they didn’t want to “feed in to [sic] anti-vaccination rhetoric.”
During an April 29 hearing, Johnson revealed that a longtime U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical officer, Ana Szarfman, M.D., Ph.D., repeatedly warned colleagues that the agency’s approach to safety monitoring could miss serious safety signals due to a problem known as “masking.” Masking occurs when other vaccines obscure risks tied to a specific product.
Johnson said FDA officials brushed aside Szarfman’s warnings.
The CDC, HHS and Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the contracts.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
‘Let That Sink In’: Feds Charge Two NIH Researchers With Smuggling Mpox Into U.S.
By Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW | The Defender | June 3, 2026
Two National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers are charged with conspiring to smuggle biological materials, including deactivated monkeypox virus samples, into the U.S. from Africa. The researchers also allegedly lied to federal authorities about what they were carrying, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Detroit.
Vincent Munster, Ph.D., a Dutch citizen and chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe Yinda, Ph.D., a Cameroonian research fellow, are charged with conspiracy to smuggle goods into the U.S. and making false statements to federal investigators.
Both men work at a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, the highest level of containment used for research involving dangerous pathogens.
According to federal prosecutors, the researchers arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Jan. 25 after traveling from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a monkeypox outbreak was ongoing.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers questioned the pair about a large black case they were carrying. Prosecutors allege the men told officers the case contained diagnostic and testing equipment, but investigators later determined it held 113 vials stored in Styrofoam coolers.
Testing of a portion of the samples found deactivated monkeypox virus in 17 vials, chickenpox virus in one vial and human DNA in two others.
“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo,” U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. said in announcing the charges. “Let that sink in.”
Federal authorities stressed that the case centers on alleged violations of importation and disclosure requirements. Prosecutors did not accuse the defendants of intentionally releasing pathogens or harming the public.
FBI Detroit Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Runyan said the allegations demonstrate that scientific credentials do not exempt researchers from federal statutes.
“No researchers should believe their positions, credentials, or professional status place them above the law,” Runyan said.
Marcus L. Sykes, special agent in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, called the alleged conduct “a breach of the public’s trust” and said unauthorized transport of biological materials “could have placed the public at risk.”
The complaint alleges Munster “adamantly denied” carrying biological samples and at one point told investigators that any necessary documentation was on his laptop. “I do this all the time,” he said, according to an FBI affidavit. Authorities said Munster did not produce the documentation he claimed to have.
Neither defendant responded to emails requesting comment.
Congressional inquiry into past research ties
Munster has previously been mentioned in congressional oversight inquiries involving COVID-19 research.
A 2024 letter from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), then ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, to then-NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli said committee investigators had reviewed documents they believed showed collaboration among researchers affiliated with NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology on SARS-related coronavirus studies.
The letter cited Munster as a participant in the work alongside EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, Ph.D., University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., and Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Zhengli Shi, Ph.D.
The correspondence did not make a finding of wrongdoing but said the materials “indicate” involvement in coronavirus research projects under congressional review.
Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, said the letter raises additional questions about Munster’s past medical ties.
“If the letter is correct, Munster’s record likely includes the unlawful importation and false claims incidents for which he was arrested, but also a share in culpability for causing COVID,” Ebright said.
‘Experimental laboratory approaches’
In a LinkedIn post earlier this year, Munster referenced an article about transmission of the monkeypox (also referred to as mpox) virus “translating our work in the Republic of the Congo towards experimental laboratory approaches.”
Munster and Yinda also co-authored a paper published earlier this year in The Lancet warning that the spread of monkeypox was becoming a “global threat.”
They said cases detected in multiple regions suggested ongoing international spread and called for expanded surveillance, stronger contact tracing and further research into how efficiently the virus transmits and whether sustained community spread is possible outside Africa.
NIH ‘cooperating fully with law enforcement’
The NIH has not commented on the charges, but the agency said it would assist legal authorities in the case.
“This matter is currently under investigation, and NIH is cooperating fully with law enforcement and appropriate authorities,” the agency said in a statement.
The charges emerge amid reports of an employee at Rocky Mountain Laboratories potentially being exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) in late 2025.
Federal officials said the leak was contained and posed no risk to public health, while some legal experts told The Defender these instances were “surprisingly common.”
Munster and Yinda are scheduled to appear in federal court in Montana. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison.
Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW, is an investigative reporter for The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Intelligence Agency Investigating CIA Whistleblower Allegations, Official Confirms
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 15, 2026
An official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) today told The Defender that the Intelligence Community Inspector General is aware of allegations by a CIA whistleblower that the agency obstructed a task force investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and is investigating them, along with ODNI and other agencies.
In written testimony provided to the U.S. Senate this week, James E. Erdman III told a Senate committee that the CIA obstructed the work of the CIA’s Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG), an agency task force investigating the origins of COVID-19, and retaliated against those in the group who believed the virus may have leaked from a lab.
Erdman worked for the DIG between March 2025 and April 2026. The group, created by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, was ordered to start winding down in January and has since been dissolved.
Soon after the group started to wind down, “the CIA retaliated” against members who supported the lab-leak hypothesis, Erdman wrote.
Erdman, one of the earliest members of the DIG, said he was hired due to his “many years of experience at the CIA and my knowledge on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
But during his year with DIG, “the CIA obstructed lawful oversight related to the DIG’s work and retaliated against the DIG with what I believe were illegal investigations into DIG members.”
Intelligence officials ‘spent years covering up the truth’
According to Erdman’s testimony, he believes ODNI, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and CIA personnel “have spent years covering up the truth” about the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The CIA did not comply with lawful oversight requests during the DIG’s investigation,” Erdman wrote.
Erdman’s written statement adds to the oral testimony he delivered before the Senate on Wednesday, as part of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) ongoing investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Erdman told the Senate that “Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional” and that the CIA targeted whistleblowers supporting the lab-leak theory.
In an interview with The Defender on Thursday, Erdman’s attorney, Carol Thompson, said her client is now “concerned that the CIA will use bureaucratic processes and alleged secrecy requirements to undermine his testimony and obfuscate the truth.”
In a letter to CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Thursday, Sens. Paul and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) forwarded a copy of Erdman’s written testimony — and warned the agency not to take any action against Erdman.
“We expect no retaliatory action of any kind to be taken against Mr. Erdman in connection with his appearance before the Committee,” the letter states.
An individual with knowledge of the situation told The Defender that ODNI previously received a complaint alleging that the CIA was spying on DIG members.
Stephanie Weidle, executive director of Feds for Freedom, a group Erdman co-founded that advocates for government transparency and informed consent, called Erdman “a hero.” She told The Defender his testimony shows that “checks and balances are broken.”
“The CIA is undermining Congress and their boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard,” Weidle said. “The CIA spies on innocent American citizens, including those tasked with rooting out corruption. They have not yet been held accountable.”
“The agency under investigation killed the investigation,” said Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo. “The question this raises is who is actually running the U.S., the elected president and his DNI, or a permanent intelligence bureaucracy that has now demonstrated, on the record, that it can dissolve its own oversight.”
The CIA did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment by press time.
‘Dissolution of the DIG has halted critical transparency work’
According to the ODNI, the DIG was formally established in April 2025 and tasked with “restoring transparency and accountability to the Intelligence Community.”
Its mission included reviewing documents for potential declassification — “including information related to COVID-19 origins.”
The CIA hasn’t publicly listed DIG members. However, The Washington Post reported in July 2025 that senior national intelligence officer Paul McNamara, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and Marine officer, oversaw DIG’s efforts.
According to the Post, some intelligence officials were “privately concerned” that DIG “could be used to pursue perceived disloyalty to the Trump administration, including to identify individuals who implemented the policies of the previous administration.”
According to Erdman’s testimony, in October 2025, investigative journalist Steve Baker contacted ODNI “with information allegedly related to the identity of the January 6 pipe bomber.”
DIG “could not and did not attempt to corroborate Baker’s allegations,” but consulted with senior ODNI leadership to share this information with appropriate agencies that could investigate the matter.
That revelation led to a series of events and “drama” that “helped spark a pause in the DIG’s work in December 2025, and its ultimate dissolution in January 2026,” Erdman alleged in his testimony.
“The dissolution of the DIG has halted critical transparency work,” Erdman wrote.
CIA fired contractor involved with DIG’s COVID origins probe
But even before then, the CIA was obstructing the DIG’s work, Erdman alleged — including its investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
“The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG personnel … their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers,” Erdman wrote.
A CIA contractor involved with the DIG’s COVID-19 origins investigation “was fired one day after meeting with the DIG.”
Erdman alleged the investigation also faced obstructions from within ODNI:
“In my time at the DIG, my team reviewed internal communications that led me to believe that ODNI [and] NIC, under then DNI Avril Haines, did not conduct a serious review or declassification effort for these documents.
“I also reviewed thousands of pages of material that I believe were responsive to the law, but that the Intelligence Community ignored.”
Once DIG was shut down, its investigative work into COVID-19’s origins was transferred to the NIC, Erdman wrote.
Former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova told The Defender that COVID-19 has long been a “classified global military operation.”
“It is not surprising to me that the CIA is ‘not happy’ with Erdman’s testimony. It is likely that they are not happy with the fact that the testimony may pull on the thread that will lead in the direction of the intelligence and defense agencies’ role in the internationally coordinated Project COVID-19,” Latypova said.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
COVID Conniving Receives First Federal Indictment
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | May 1, 2026
David Morens, a former top advisor to COVID Czar Tony Fauci was indicted this week and “charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting,” according to the Justice Department press release.
Morens allegedly helped top federal health officials cover up the potential role of federal grants in spurring the COVID pandemic. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires federal agencies to preserve and disclose federal records with some narrow exceptions. In early 2021, Morens emailed a colleague, “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe.”
Morens added, “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.” In a previous email, he assured his collaborators, “I have spoken to our FOIA folks” and “I should be safe from future FOIAs. Don’t ask how…”
Fauci doesn’t need to worry about getting indicted since President Joe Biden, on his last morning in office, pardoned any crimes that Fauci might have committed in the previous decade. Fauci justified COVID mandates because average citizens “don’t have the ability” to determine what is best for them. Congressional investigations revealed that Fauci was at the center of string-pulling to shirk responsibility on COVID.
Top federal officials scrambled to erase the federal role in bankrolling reckless gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, the most likely source of the COVID virus that killed more than seven million people around the world. That type of research seeks to genetically alter organisms to enable the spread of viruses into new species. As MIT professor Kevin Esvelt asked in 2021, “Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?” The risks were compounded because the Wuhan Institute had a very poor safety rating. Two years earlier, the State Department confidentially “warned other federal agencies about safety issues at Wuhan labs studying bat COVID,” but the public disclosure of that alert was delayed until 2022—long after President Biden illegally mandated COVID vaccines for a hundred million American adults.
If COVID-19 had been initially recognized as the result of one of the biggest government boondoggles in history, it would have been far more difficult for American politicians and government scientists to pirouette as saviors as they seized sway over daily life. Instead, politicians, bureaucrats, and the media stampeded most of the American public with the notion that total submission to boneheaded decrees was their only hope to survive.
Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a statement on the indictment of Morens:
“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most—during the height of a global pandemic.”
Luckily, there haven’t been any “profound abuses of trust” since Trump took office again—at least according to his Justice Department. Blanche added, “Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest — not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”
Be still my beating heart. Is this a subtle signal that the Trump team will disclose the other three million documents on the Epstein scandal?
FBI chief Kash Patel announced at the indictment press conference, “Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI.”
Has the FBI turned over a new leaf or what? The FBI is one of the most notorious FOIA violators in Washington. When FOIA was first passed in 1966, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agency to totally refuse compliance with the law. A federal judge slammed the FBI in 2017 for claiming it needed seventeen years to fulfill a FOIA request on surveillance of antiwar activists in the 1960s. The FBI deleted the names of Clark Kent and Lois Lane from a letter that made reference to the famous Superman characters—because disclosing them in a FOIA response would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Louis Freeh, director of the FBI from 1993-2001, repeatedly denounced my articles on Ruby Ridge; but when I filed a FOIA, the FBI claimed to have no records of those published letters to the editor. They sent their response to “Mr. Brovard” so maybe that helped them not find anything.
FBI FOIA trampling is par for the Bureau covering up its destruction of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. As federal judge Terry Doughty declared in a 2023 decision, “The FBI [acted] as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
Morens may be the first federal official to ever be charged with a crime for actions to evade FOIA requests. Certainly, in more than fifty years, no federal FOIA official has ever been jailed for violating the law by refusing to disclose information. I’ve received so many BS responses from FOIA officers over the decades that I have lost count. When I filed a FOIA with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to see what information they had on me in their files, they replied in 2010, “We have no records on Kevin Bovard.” But I wasn’t asking about my cousin.
In 2015, I heard scuttlebutt that the Justice Department pressured USA Today to cease publishing my articles bashing Attorney General Eric Holder. I filed a FOIA to get the department’s official emails to my editors, but DOJ FOIA claimed it had nothing. I only got the damning emails after I filed a follow-up FOIA request and made a lucky guess on the exact day, hour and minute the emails were sent.
For too long, deceiving the American people has been treated like a victimless crime in Washington. If the Morens indictment can set a precedent leading to more such criminal investigations of bureaucratic cover-ups, that will be a booster shot for American democracy.
Project Artichoke: 70 Years Ago, CIA Discussed Hiding Mind-Control Drugs in Vaccines
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 24, 2026
In the 1950s, the CIA brainstormed ways to secretly perform mind control on humans — including concealing drugs in vaccines and widely consumed food products, a newly unearthed CIA document revealed. The Daily Mail first reported the story on Monday.
The seven-page document, “Special Research for Artichoke,” is dated April 23, 1952. It describes a series of ideas for how to develop chemicals designed to alter human behavior and thought.
The proposals contained in the document were part of the CIA’s top-secret Project Artichoke, which ran from 1951 to 1956, according to the Daily Mail.
The document, declassified in 1983, recently circulated on social media. However, it was not published in the CIA’s online reading room until last year.
“Some of the suggestions are controversial,” the document states. The proposals included administering drugs in secret as part of a “long-range approach to subjects.”
According to the document:
“This study should include chemicals or drugs that can effectively be concealed in common items such as food, water, coca cola, beer, liquor, cigarettes, etc.
“This type of drug should also be capable of use in standard medical treatments such as vaccinations, shots, etc.”
CIA experimented on humans as part of Project Artichoke
The document also included a special field of research for “bacteria, plant cultures, fungi, poisons of various types, etc.,” that are “capable of producing illnesses which in turn would produce high fevers, delirium, etc.”
This included “species of the mushroom” that “produce a certain type of intoxication and mental derangement.”
Also among the proposals was a suggestion to research “diet” or “dietary deficiencies” on prisoners and on people undergoing interrogation, including using “specially canned foods having elements removed.”
The document included proposals for both short-term and long-term use on humans. Drugs deemed most suitable for long-term use would be designed to produce an “agitating effect (producing anxiety, nervousness, tension, etc.) or a depressing effect (creating a feeling of despondency, hopelessness, lethargy, etc.).”
According to The Daily Mail, the CIA experimented on humans as part of Project Artichoke. The experiments often involved “vulnerable subjects, including prisoners, military personnel and psychiatric patients.” The experiments were usually performed “without informed consent.”
According to Ben Tapper, a Nebraska chiropractor who was included in the “Disinformation Dozen” list in 2021 for questioning vaccine safety, the document exposes “a disturbing reality that government agencies have historically explored ways to manipulate human behavior through chemical and biological means, including concepts involving food and medical interventions.”
“This is not speculation or conspiracy, and it should deeply concern every American who values bodily autonomy and informed consent,” Tapper said.
Precursor to the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control experiments?
The Daily Mail cited CIA documents suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies were concerned that enemy nations had developed their own mind and behavioral control techniques. This led the agency to prioritize the development of its own methods.
Project Artichoke “served as a precursor” to the MK-Ultra program, which the CIA launched in 1953. That program “broadened mind-altering experiments on a larger scale,” the Daily Mail reported.
Many of the documents related to this type of experimentation were destroyed in 1973, “leaving the full extent of the research and how far it progressed unknown.”
Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., CEO of Daily Clout and author of “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity,” told The Defender that the documents further confirm a long history of intelligence agency research targeting human thought and behavior.
“Sadly, it’s long been established that our intelligence agencies, and those of our enemies, have sought to alter human consciousness and behavior, often without the subjects’ consent. The existence of MK-Ultra, the clandestine project into which Project Artichoke evolved, is well documented,” Wolf said.
John Leake, vice president of the McCullough Foundation and author of the forthcoming book, “Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions,” said, “Researchers have long suspected that the Church Committee’s revelation of the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra mind control experiments, mostly using LSD, had the effect of obscuring the agency’s much larger Project Artichoke.”
Leake cited evidence suggesting that a 1951 mass poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, in which 250 residents experienced severe hallucinations and seven people died, was a Project Artichoke experiment. The outbreak was officially attributed to contaminated bread from a local bakery.
Leake said the 1952 document is “consistent with the suspicion that the CIA was seeking to discover mind control methods for even large populations.”
In 2024, a Reuters investigation revealed that the CIA operated a secret propaganda campaign involving vaccines in the Philippines. The campaign attacked what the agency perceived as China’s “growing influence” in the country by targeting the Chinese-made Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine through the use of phony online accounts spreading “anti-vax” messaging.
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda,” said the Project Artichoke revelations “make it clear that the CIA has posed an enormous threat to U.S. citizens, in addition to the horrors it unleashes on non-U.S. target governments and populations.”
Project Artichoke wanted to enlist help from Army’s Chemical Warfare Service
The 1952 Project Artichoke document also included a recommendation to involve the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service in the project’s efforts, citing its experience with “exhaustive studies along these lines.”
This proposal bears a resemblance to recent suggestions that COVID-19 — and the response to the pandemic — were coordinated at high levels of government, military and intelligence agencies.
Last year, former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova and retired science writer Debbie Lerman released the “Covid Dossier,” presenting evidence of the “military/intelligence coordination of the Covid biodefense response in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy.”
According to Latypova and Lerman, “Covid was not a public health event” but “a global operation, coordinated through public-private intelligence and military alliances and invoking laws designed for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) weapons attacks.”
Leake said “it is far from clear” that the Church Committee hearings of 1975 “put a complete end to CIA covert programs.” He cited the possible laboratory development of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as an example.
“The laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2 with gain-of-function techniques developed at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the U.S. military’s involvement in developing and distributing of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, should … be regarded as possible outgrowths or even continuations of Project Artichoke,” Leake said.
Experts question similarities between Project Artichoke, COVID vaccines
In a Substack post today, epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher drew a potential connection between Project Artichoke and the development of COVID-19 vaccines. Hulscher cited recent peer-reviewed studies that identified the vaccines’ adverse impact on neurological health and “surging rates of cognitive decline.”
Hulscher wrote:
“Disturbingly, since 2021, over 70% of humanity received a neurotoxic agent masquerading as a ‘vaccine.’ The same goals outlined in the CIA document (vaccines/drugs capable of covertly inducing anxiety, depression, and lethargy) are now being observed in COVID-19 vaccinated populations. …
“… If the CIA was secretly discussing covert methods to alter human behavior in the 1950s, it would be no surprise if similar classified projects emerged in the decades that followed.”
A 2024 paper published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry investigated psychiatric adverse events among over 2 million people in South Korea. The study found that “COVID-19 vaccination increased the risks of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, and sleep disorders while reducing the risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.”
A 2025 study published in the International Journal of Innovative Research in Medical Science found “alarming safety signals regarding neuropsychiatric conditions following COVID-19 vaccination, compared to the influenza vaccinations and to all other vaccinations combined.”
This included increases in schizophrenia, depression, cognitive decline, delusions, violent behavior, suicidal thoughts and homicidal ideation.
“The fact that mRNA vaccines were designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and inflame the brain — or at least, they were known to do so, during their manufacture and distribution — should give us pause in light of this news,” Wolf said.
Wolf said the latest revelations, “while shocking, provide all the more reason for us to be critical of opaque, coercive or untested vaccination programs, additives in food and water, and toxic or opaque geoengineering programs.”
Tapper said the revelations reinforce “the urgent need to protect individual liberty, medical freedom, and ethical boundaries in science and public health.”
“The lesson here is simple: vigilance is necessary when governments claim authority over the human body and mind,” Tapper said.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Epstein Pitched JPMorgan Chase on Plan to Get Bill Gates ‘More Money for Vaccines’
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 10, 2026
In the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bill Gates and key figures from the Gates Foundation regularly interacted with Jeffrey Epstein, discussing ways to finance and develop a global pandemic preparedness and vaccination network.
The communications between Gates and Epstein were included in the “Epstein Files” released Jan. 30 by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Last year’s passage of the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act prompted the release.
Sayer Ji told The Defender the files show that Epstein “functioned as a switchboard” connecting “hedge funds, central banks, billionaires, academic institutions and global health initiatives.”
Ji published his analysis of health- and medical-related information in the files in a series of Substack articles and posts on X.
Seamus Bruner, director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, said the files revealed the workings of a network of “Controligarchs on steroids, but with shocking new receipts.”
Bruner said the files showed that Epstein helped develop “the architecture for pandemic profiteering” years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The documents largely date from the 2010s — after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex and his inclusion on a registry of sex offenders.
Ji noted that months before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the same actors who appear in the Epstein files participated in Event 201 — a simulation of a global pandemic caused by a coronavirus.
The pandemic preparedness infrastructure built in the years before the pandemic helped lead to this simulation, Ji wrote.
According to The Hill, members of the U.S. Congress began reviewing unredacted versions of the documents on Monday.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), told The Defender the documents’ release is about justice, not politics.
“Rep. Ro Khanna and I have tried to keep the Epstein files from being political. The Democrats want to make it about Trump, and the Republicans want to make it about the Clintons. We want to make it about the survivors and getting them justice and transparency,” Massie said.
Gates, Epstein and the ‘architecture behind pandemics as a business model’
Ji’s series of Substack posts revealed what he described as “a 20-year architecture behind pandemics as a business model — with Bill Gates at the center of the network,” along with multinational financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase.
The documents, dating from 2011 to 2019, illustrate an “architecture whose foundations predate the COVID-19 era by more than a decade,” Ji wrote. He said they constitute evidence of “a major Wall Street bank asking a convicted sex offender to define the architecture of a Gates-linked charitable fund.”
The documents included several emails outlining the development of a Gates-led charitable fund. A Feb. 17, 2011, email from JPMorgan Chase’s Juliet Pullis to Epstein included questions from the “team that is putting together some ideas for Gates.”
Epstein’s reply outlined how this fund could be structured. The proposal would be developed further in the following months.
In a July 26, 2011, email from Epstein to JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley, on which Boris Nikolic, Gates’ chief science and technology adviser, was copied, described a “silo based proposal that will get bill [Gates] more money for vaccines.”
By Aug. 17, 2011, Staley and Mary Erdoes, then-CEO of JPMorgan Asset and Wealth Management, were discussing more details of the proposed fund, including developing “an offshore arm — especailly for vaccines” and projecting “billions of dollars” in donations within two years.
In a response later that day, Epstein said Gates was “terribly frustrated” at the slow pace of establishing the fund. He said Gates was insistent that “additional money for vaccines” be included in an upcoming presentation about the fund.
By Aug. 31, 2011, JPMorgan Chase had apparently developed a proposal called “Project Molecule,” where the bank would partner with the Gates Foundation to develop a perpetual charitable fund for pandemic preparedness and surveillance, vaccine promotion and disease eradication.
According to Ji, the proposal contains many of the ideas Epstein had previously discussed with JPMorgan Chase executives. It also contained plans to spend millions of dollars to purchase oral polio vaccines for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a rotavirus vaccine for Latin America, and a meningitis vaccine for Africa.
The proposal suggested that Melinda Gates chair the fund’s strategic program/grant and distribution committee and that Erdoes, Warren Buffett, Jordan’s Queen Rania and Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, also participate. The Gates Foundation funded Gavi’s launch in 1999 and holds a permanent seat on its board.
Ji wrote that while Epstein’s name does not appear in the Project Molecule proposal, it acts as the “institutional translation of the architecture he was sketching informally.”
By 2013, these efforts appear to have led to the launch of the Global Health Investment Fund. A confidential Sept. 23, 2013, briefing described the fund as “the first investment fund focused on global health drug and vaccine development.” The fund promised investors annual returns of 5%-7%.
Among the attendees at the fund’s September 2013 launch were JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and representatives of Pfizer, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline (now GSK).
Gates could ‘work with anyone on earth’ but ‘chose a registered sex offender’
According to Ji, Nikolic’s involvement is significant. In August 2013, Gates and Epstein signed an agreement, in which Gates “specifically requested” that Epstein “personally serve” as Nikolic’s representative. The letter noted Epstein’s “existing collegial relationship” with Gates.
“This agreement was executed five years after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution,” Ji wrote. “Gates had the resources to work with anyone on earth. He chose a registered sex offender — and put it in writing.”
The documents showed that a month earlier — on July 18, 2013 — Epstein authored a draft email apparently intended for Gates. It references Epstein’s friendship with Gates, his disappointment that Gates sent him an “unfriendly strongly worded email,” and referenced sordid communications the two apparently previously shared.
“TO add insult to the injury you them implore me to please delete the emails regarding your std, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda and the description of your penis,” Epstein wrote.
In a video posted on X, Michael Kane, director of advocacy for Children’s Health Defense, said that while it’s unknown whether Epstein ever sent that email to Gates, “the next month they’re in a contract together.”
“I think Bill Gates got the message,” Kane said.
In November 2023, a federal judge approved a $290 million settlement between JPMorgan Chase and over 100 women who accused Epstein of sexual abuse. The women alleged that JPMorgan Chase continued doing business with Epstein despite internal warnings over a span of several years.
“JPMorgan banked Epstein for years despite clear red flags — over $1 billion in suspicious transactions flagged internally and ignored. They knew. They didn’t care,” wrote The Truth About Cancer.
Did Epstein play role in launch of the ‘biosecurity state’?
According to Ji, the documents provide a roadmap for how a pandemic preparedness infrastructure was developed and how it helped make Event 201 possible.
“By the time Event 201 convened, the architecture … was no longer conceptual. It had been funded, structured, bonded, insured, staffed, and legally papered. What remained was the rehearsal,” Ji wrote.
September 2014 documents show that Gates disclosed his upcoming meeting with President Obama to Epstein, just as an adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak sent Epstein an invitation to a private, off-the-record reception with Obama the following month.
Ji said the communications occurred during “the week Ebola was formally reclassified as a threat to international peace and security.” He said the timing is significant, as this “was the week the biosecurity state was born.”
According to Ji, these developments helped activate the infrastructure outlined in Project Molecule, where Epstein acted as a node for Ebola-related project proposals.
This included Epstein receiving a United Nations (U.N.) diplomat’s proposal for the development of a “Nexus Centre for peace and health” that would take “into account the serious impact of Ebola,” and a proposal by a group of scientists for a pre-symptomatic Ebola detection system using PCR testing.
The scientists behind the proposal — affiliated with a U.S. military biolab at Fort Detrick, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — asked Epstein to send the proposal to Gates and the Gates Foundation.
By October 2014, Epstein was warning Kathy Ruemmler, then White House counsel to Obama, of the political cost if Obama didn’t take action on Ebola. By 2015, Epstein was acting as an intermediary in efforts to convene global experts who would “discuss how we can most effectively address and prevent pandemics.”
The proposal, by the International Peace Institute’s Terje Rød-Larsen, led to the convening of a May 2015 closed-door meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, titled “Preparing for Pandemics: Lessons Learned for More Effective Responses.” The World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank and U.N. were involved with the meeting.
The meeting’s agenda included sessions addressing “how pandemics should be anticipated, how authority should be exercised, how multiple stakeholders should be coordinated, and — critically — what legal, institutional, and financial mechanisms must be put in place in advance to enable rapid, centralized response,” Ji wrote.
According to Ji, the COVID-19 pandemic response has its roots in the 2014 Ebola response, as Ebola “was the first disease to formally justify the suspension of normal political and sovereign constraints on a global scale. … When the next global health emergency arrived — COVID-19 — the playbook was already written.”
“Epstein appears in the background of precisely these formative conversations — serving as a connector between global finance, philanthropic capital, and biological risk governance,” Ji told The Defender.
Epstein involved in ‘strain pandemic simulation’ two years before COVID
By 2017, these conversations led to proposals for pandemic simulations.
In a January 2017 iMessage thread between Epstein and an unidentified physician seeking help in finding a new job, the physician cited “expertise with public health security.”
The physician, who had experience at the U.N., WHO, Gates Foundation and World Bank, said he “just did pandemic simulation,” which could become a “big platform.”
Referring to Gates, the physician told Epstein, “He hates mental health but he’s crazy about vaccines and autism stuff. That could be start to a more broad conversation.”
A March 2017 email chain, which included Epstein and Gates, discussed efforts by the then-bgC3, Gates’ private strategic office, to develop “Follow-up recommendations and/or technical specifications for strain pandemic simulation.”
Ji noted that in 2017, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched at the World Economic Forum (WEF), with Gates Foundation funding and a goal of creating “pandemic-busting vaccines” within 100 days. Later that year, the World Bank issued the first-ever pandemic bonds.
Event 201, held just six weeks before the first publicly acknowledged COVID-19 cases were announced, involved the Gates Foundation, WEF and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Global financial institutions, media organizations and intelligence agencies also participated.
The simulation focused on the response to a novel coronavirus outbreak by governments, pharmaceutical companies, media outlets and social media platforms.
Ji said the Epstein Files don’t show that COVID-19 was planned or manufactured, or that Event 201 led to COVID-19. Instead, they prove that “the institutional infrastructure to capitalize on exactly this kind of crisis was already built, tested, staffed, and insured.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
This is How We Should Have Responded to COVID-19
By Dr Alan Mordue and Dr Greta Mushet | The Daily Sceptic | January 24, 2026
Since March 2020 there has been an almost continuous refrain that the UK was not prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic – across the mainstream media, at the UK Covid Inquiry and most recently by Dominic Cummings in a Spectator interview. So much so that it seems to have become an accepted ‘truth’ regardless of the actual facts. Nevertheless there are facts, even in the postmodern dystopian world we now live in.
Firstly, we did have a detailed UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy published in 2011 and it was explicit in saying that it could be adapted to respond to other respiratory virus pandemics, and gave as an example the first Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus (SARS). Secondly, there was further national guidance in 2013 and 2017 to update the strategy. Thirdly, this national guidance helped all four nations and each local health board or authority to develop their own pandemic plans which were regularly reviewed and updated. Fourthly, we had many systematic reviews of the evidence for non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to minimise transmission, one published only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic started. And finally, the UK scored second in a global assessment of countries’ pandemic preparedness in 2019.
So, the ‘unprepared’ mantra was not the whole truth and arguably we were comparatively well prepared. However, in the event all this preparation did prove to be useless – but only because we decided to abandon it all in March 2020. We binned our pandemic plans and ignored the careful reviews of the evidence and the experience gained responding to previous pandemics. No doubt the UK strategy will be updated, but whatever is produced could be just as easily discarded next time. So what can be done?
Perhaps what we need is something more accessible, something that reflects the ethical and democratic foundations of our country, and, given how important this is for the whole of society, something that is shared widely – well beyond public health departments, the office of the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the NHS. Core principles on how we should respond to a pandemic that are shared, understood and agreed with the public, perhaps through their representatives in Parliament, might give us some scientific, ethical and governance guardrails. They might help to improve and protect accountability and also stand a better chance of surviving beyond a few weeks when the next pandemic hits.
If so, what might such principles contain? Here we offer some suggestions with commentary on how they were applied, or not, during the Covid-19 pandemic, grouped under four headings – epidemiological, medical, ethical, and democratic. Many of these principles don’t appear in the UK Strategy, or those of the four nations or local pandemic plans … and for very understandable reasons. Prior to 2020 they were taken for granted, they were so obvious that they did not need stating, they were the principles and codes that the public health specialty and the medical profession had followed for decades if not centuries, they were the way we conducted ourselves in our liberal democratic society. The Covid-19 pandemic response changed all that – we now clearly need to restate our commitment to core, indeed fundamental, principles.
Epidemiological principles
The first task in epidemiology is to assess the scale and severity of a new disease or health problem, examine how it varies by time, place and person (age, sex, occupation etc.), and compare it with other diseases. This helps to ensure that any response is proportionate and identifies those at greater and lower risk, as well generating hypotheses about potential causes.
In the context of a respiratory viral pandemic, data on case and infection fatality ratios are paramount. These were available early in the COVID-19 pandemic and before the first UK lockdown. Instead of these data being reported accurately, compared to previous pandemic data and carefully explained to the population (for example here), public messaging was alarmist and seemed designed to instil fear not reassure, and made little reference to those at lower risk (see Laura Dodsworth’s 2021 book A State of Fear). In a future pandemic the public should expect such data, the media should demand them, the CMO should have a responsibility to identify and collate them, and government responses should be calibrated based upon them.
Then to ensure accurate monitoring of the developing pandemic within the country and valid comparison to earlier pandemics the standard definitions for confirmed cases, hospitalisations and deaths should be employed. This did not happen in the COVID-19 pandemic with new definitions adopted, definitions that for all three exaggerated the statistics. This was compounded by inappropriate widespread testing using a PCR test insufficiently specific and using inappropriate cycle thresholds.
There was a further concern that arose during the pandemic response on the epidemiological front: the use and impact of modelling studies. Whilst such studies can be helpful they cannot be interpreted without understanding their underlying inputs, assumptions and methods. They are ‘what if’ studies – for example, what if we assume that the number of cases will grow exponentially without any seasonal effect, what if we assume no existing immunity in the population from other coronaviruses, etc. The Imperial College modelling study published in March 2020 seems to have had a significant impact on the push for the first lockdown, but it had not been peer-reviewed and seems to have been insufficiently debated and challenged; of course, it is now widely considered to have been flawed. Modelling studies are not reality, they are not facts, they are not evidence, they are better viewed as ‘what if’ scenarios and their assumptions and results should be rigorously challenged. Their presentation to politicians without critical analysis and careful interpretation amounts to professional negligence.
Medical principles
Science and medicine only develop through open debate and a willingness to consider alternative views, even if they are contrary to the current orthodoxy. This did not happen during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the oft repeated term ‘The Science’ demonstrates. There is no such thing: there is rarely a consensus and science is never settled, we only ever have the current disputed theories which remain until better ones come along. Any pandemic response should be open to challenge and wide debate so that we are not limited to the knowledge and experience of only a few prominent scientific and medical government advisors. The thoughtful and detailed letters addressed to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) from often in excess of 100 doctors and scientists on the merits or otherwise of Covid vaccination of children were a case in point, and were ignored or summarily dismissed. Public health messages to the population certainly need to be clear and if possible consistent to maximise understanding, but this does not preclude an open and vigorous debate within the medical and scientific community, something that is essential if we are to develop an optimal response.
In 1979 Archie Cochrane, widely regarded as the father of evidence-based medicine, made his famous comment that: “It is surely a great criticism of our profession that we have not organised a critical summary, by speciality or subspeciality, adapted periodically, of all relevant randomised controlled trials.” The international Cochrane Collaboration, named after him and designed to address this criticism, produced a series of systematic reviews on the effectiveness of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses such as school and business closures, social distancing measures and restrictions on large gatherings. Despite the limited evidence for effectiveness and the relatively poor quality of the evidence from these reviews and similar conclusions from a WHO review published in September 2019, almost all these measures were applied to the whole population from March 2020, including a ‘lockdown’ of healthy people.
We copied the response of a totalitarian state despite a lack of evidence and despite the fact that these same systematic reviews drew attention to the widespread harms that would be caused by implementing these measures across the whole population. These harms are beginning to be appreciated across multiple areas – in terms of mortality and physical health particularly of older people, the social development of young children, the mental health and education of young people, businesses across the country as well as jobs, the economy and the benefits system.
An evidence-based approach also required a thorough review of the evidence on the benefits and harms for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in individuals. The limited data on the effectiveness of the novel gene technology ‘vaccines’ (and see Clare Craig’s 2025 book Spiked – A Shot in the Dark) and on their side-effects, with no data at all on long term harms, pointed clearly towards their use only in those at higher risk with full disclosure on what was known and what was not. In the event, of course, they were recommended and pushed on most of the population including those at insignificant risk. Furthermore, ‘safe and effective’ was far from a full disclosure of the evidence on benefits and risks.
By contrast, the use of re-purposed drugs such as ivermectin with known anti-viral and anti-inflammatory effects, extensive evidence on effectiveness and a well-documented safety profile, was actively discouraged.
In all these areas, doctors should be acting as advocates for their patients, informing them as best they can and helping them to make decisions on their treatment and care, as required by the General Medical Council’s guidance ‘Good Medical Practice.’ However, as already discussed, the informing was cursory and partial, and the contact often non-existent or via leaflet or video-call.
If they are to regain public trust the medical profession and public health authorities must do better next time, and patients and the public must demand better information and better discussion and engagement with medical staff to help them make decisions.
Ethical principles – informed consent for individuals
The Greek philosopher and physician Hippocrates developed his Oath around 400 BC. It urged doctors to act with beneficence – that is, to help their patients and prevent harm – and non-maleficence – that is to do no harm themselves or primum non nocere. The term appropriateness brings these two concepts together – an appropriate treatment is one that has been chosen because its benefits outweigh its harms in the particular patient.
As outlined above, evidence-based medicine involves the careful assessment of the evidence, ideally from randomised controlled trials, to quantify these benefits and harms. Whilst the patient advocacy role of doctors involves them in informing and supporting their patients to make informed decisions on their treatment and care.
Although this process sounds simple and straightforward, it is not. It seems to be taken more seriously in surgical practice, after notable legal cases, but less so in medical practice with the prescribing of drugs and vaccines. Certainly in the pandemic consenting practices for vaccination were cursory, to the point of being non-existent – public information heralding the ‘safe and effective’ vaccines was at best partial, and coercion was widespread via national advertising that deliberately sought to shame and manipulate, via vaccine mandates, and via bans from venues without proof of vaccination (or negative Covid antigen tests).
Large relative risk reductions of 70% for the Astra Zeneca ‘vaccine’ and 95% for the Pfizer ‘vaccine’ were trumpeted, but not the smaller, less convincing absolute risk reductions of around 1-2%. And there was no attempt to directly compare benefits and risks and harms, the key information a patient needs to give fully informed consent.
The wholesale abandonment of standard codes of practice for informed consent during the pandemic was truly shocking. To regain public trust the medical profession needs to take this key responsibility more seriously and particularly improve practice in relation to long term medications and vaccinations.
Democratic principles
The UK Strategy of 2011 did emphasise the importance of accurate and timely information to the public, and stressed that uncertainty and any alarmist reporting in the media could create additional pressures on health services. Despite this, the early epidemiological data on the scale and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, a comparison with previous pandemics and clear identification of those at higher and lower risk were not shared with the public and carefully explained. The data that were given were far vaguer and the messages seemed designed to raise anxiety rather than contain it and modulate it to appropriate levels. Government advisors seem to have entirely lost sight of these crucial epidemiological data that are so essential to enable the government to calibrate its response and ensure it was proportionate. Data reflecting reality seem to have been overshadowed by modelling data reflecting potential future scenarios – fiction rather than fact influenced key decisions.
Whatever national response is being contemplated to a pandemic, there needs to be a clear separation of the medical and scientific evidence on the benefits and risks of specific interventions on the one hand, and the political value judgements and decisions on the other. Governmental advisors must present options and their benefits, risks, harms and likely costs to ministers, and in a democracy it is for ministers to decide as they are accountable to the electorate. This relationship is akin to the doctor-patient relationship – the doctor informs the patient and supports him or her to make his or her own decision but does not lead or coerce. This line may have been blurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, government advisors seemed reluctant to identify, and where possible quantify, the risks, harms and costs that might flow from the options they put to ministers despite some, like lockdowns, being unprecedented in their severity and scope.
In turn ministers and politicians more generally have a responsibility to ensure that their advisors present them with the epidemiological data and the data on the benefits, risks and costs of recommended options. Ministers also have a responsibility to ensure that differences of opinion on how best to respond within the medical and scientific community are fully aired and discussed. This is crucial to arrive at an optimal response and to avoid groupthink. Only if ministers do these things can they take decisions on behalf of their population and give fully informed consent.
Crucially ministers have a particular responsibility to protect the basic freedoms we enjoy in a democratic society – freedom of speech, association and movement and individual bodily autonomy when it comes to medical treatments. Any infringement of such basic freedoms demands a clear, unambiguous and overwhelming justification, must be subject to challenge in Cabinet and Parliament, and must be the least restrictive as is possible to achieve the aim – in extent, impact and time. This is such a fundamental issue that we perhaps need to develop a framework to guide and constrain actions: defining the types of evidence and high thresholds that are required; limiting powers in terms of their impact, duration and the number of people affected; and outlining checks and balances, with perhaps an automatic independent review afterwards. We have such a clear and rigorous framework for compulsory detention under the Mental Health Acts when one individual is affected: we need at least as rigorous a framework when the freedom of millions is at stake.
There has also been considerable criticism of how the usual democratic governance systems were subverted and avoided during the pandemic, including the use of emergency legislation by the executive without appropriate challenge within Parliament. These governance systems are essential to enable questioning and challenge by MPs and select committees with the aim of improving decision making, and to ensure a clear justification for measures taken and transparency to facilitate accountability. This did not happen during the COVID-19 pandemic as clearly outlined in The Accountability Deficit by Kingsley, Skinner and Kingsley (2023).
In all of these four areas – epidemiological, medical, ethical and democratic – principles were violated during the COVID-19 pandemic with dire consequences for health, basic freedoms, quality of life, education, business and the economy, and for democracy and society itself. Before 2020 it would have seemed unnecessary to state such core principles. Now, having set a precedent when we abandoned them, it seems absolutely essential not only to restate them but to discuss them widely and if possible to reaffirm our commitment to uphold them before another pandemic hits.
Dr Alan Mordue is a retired consultant in public health medicine and Dr Greta Mushet is a retired consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
The UK Covid Inquiry: Propaganda to protect the ‘pandemic’ narrative
By Gary L. Sidley | Propaganda In Focus | January 9, 2026
On the 20th of November, 2025, the UK Covid Inquiry published a report on Module 2 of its ongoing review titled, ‘Core decision-making and political governance’. Despite, to date, spending around £192 million of taxpayers’ money on an in-depth investigation into the management of the 2020 ‘pandemic’, this 800-page tome indicates that the overarching conclusion of the Inquiry will most likely be that the unprecedented and net harmful government responses (lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine coercion) were all necessary, and the only problems related to the timings of the interventions and process failures. As such, this Module 2 report can be reasonably construed as a propaganda exercise primarily intent on preserving the core elements of the dominant, fundamentally flawed, covid narrative.
In the words of the oft-quoted Edward Bernays, propaganda involves ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses’. It is clear that this Module 2 report, and the UK Covid Inquiry as a whole, strive to do just that. With the primary goal of protecting the ‘pandemic’ story – that in early 2020, a uniquely lethal pathogen spread carnage across the world, and unprecedented and draconian restrictions on our day-to-day lives were essential to prevent Armageddon – the inquiry has incorporated a range of manipulation techniques designed to promulgate this state-sanctioned ideology. The two most prominent opinion-shaping strategies deployed by the Inquiry have been the suppression of dissenting perspectives, and a narrowing of the Overton window.
Suppression of dissenting perspectives
In her initial selection of ‘core participants’ for the Inquiry, Chairperson Baroness Hallett signalled her intention to marginalise voices that were likely to be critical of the official covid narrative. Those granted core status benefitted from the opportunity to make opening and closing statements, and to suggest lines of questioning to the witnesses, whereas those groups excluded were limited to submitting written evidence in the hope that it would be considered by the Inquiry team. Organisations who had been openly opposed to the mainstream public health responses during the covid event – for example, Us For Them (who repeatedly highlighted the devastating impact of the restrictions on our nation’s children) and the Health Advisory & Recovery Team (a group of scientists and clinicians concerned about ‘pandemic’ policy and guidance recommendations) – were unsuccessful in their applications.
Consideration of those groups who were permitted to be core participants for Module 2 clearly shows a preponderance of stakeholders who were highly likely to be on board with the central tenets of the official covid narrative. In addition to the expected establishment figures (representatives from various government departments, the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, the UK Health Security Agency) and four ‘Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice’ groups, it is difficult not to conclude that other core participants were selected on account of their fervour for more and earlier restrictions. For instance, despite ‘long covid’ being a highly contested concept, three groups representing the victims of this assumed malady were awarded core status. Similarly, the British Medical Association (who energetically campaigned for longer lockdowns and stricter mask mandates) also managed to secure a place in Baroness Hallett’s inner circle.
Despite this crude censorship, a significant amount of critical commentary did reach the Inquiry, in the form of both live testimony and written statements. Crucially, however, these counter narratives were de-emphasised by the Inquiry team and – subsequently – were not reflected in its conclusions. One blatant example of a dissenting voice being prematurely curtailed was the interview with Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and longstanding critic of the dominant covid narrative. When Heneghan asserted that expert interpretation of published research constitutes valid evidence for the Inquiry, Hallett retorted, ‘Not in my world it doesn’t … if there is anything further, please submit it in writing’. This abruptness contrasts sharply with the deferent, sometimes sycophantic, way establishment witnesses were managed by the Inquiry team.
Narrowing the Overton window
It was apparent from the start of the UK Covid Inquiry that Baroness Hallett and her legal team had decided which public health decisions made during the covid event were open to critical scrutiny and which were not. This contraction of the Overton window ensured that crucial elements of the official narrative were shielded from critical analysis.
To illustrate, three pre-determined assumptions – foundational to the official covid story – seemed to fall into this protected category:
1. Lockdowns were necessary
The headline-grabbing conclusion in the Module 2 report was that locking down a week earlier would have saved 23,000 lives. This absurd deduction was not based on robust science or real-world studies, but drawn from the fantasy realm of mathematical modelling. An in-depth analysis of covid-era decision making (which is what the Inquiry was supposed to be) would have given prominence to a detailed cost-benefits evaluation of lockdowns, a process that would have revealed the substantial harms of this unparalleled pandemic restriction. The key reason for the omission of this vital analysis was the Inquiry’s premature assumption that lockdowns were an effective public health tool, essential for the containment of a – purportedly – novel virus.
More specifically, Baroness Hallett and her team adopted a classic propaganda strategy, commonly referred to as ‘unanimity’. With the presumption that all right-thinking people recognise that lockdowns save lives, the Overton window was squeezed to become merely a question of timing; any testimony straying outside of this range of acceptability was ignored – or, at best, reduced to background noise – while, in contrast, speculations about the life-saving benefits of an earlier societal shutdown were amplified.
2. The mass vaccination programme was a great success
Despite increasing recognition that the covid vaccines were less efficacious, and more harmful, than initially claimed, the Inquiry appears to have adopted the foundational assumption that these novel products were safe and effective, and anyone who believed otherwise must constitute a deviant minority at odds with the unanimous opinion of right-thinking people. Indications for the constant presence of this guiding notion are brazen. Thus, Hugo Keith KC (the lead counsel to the Inquiry) has, at various points during his interactions with witnesses, described the vaccines as ‘entirely effective… undoubted successes… with lifesaving benefits that vastly outweighed the very rare risk of serious side effects’. Similarly, Baroness Hallett – at the press conference announcing the findings of Module 2 – hailed the vaccine programme as a ‘remarkable achievement’.
3. Community masking was not associated with any appreciable negative consequences
It was evident at an early stage in the Inquiry that another untouchable premise was that the masking of healthy people in community settings was a sensible precaution that could only have net benefits. Thus, when Professor Peter Horby, the chair of NERVTAG (a high-profile SAGE advisory group), gave evidence in October 2023 he reiterated his group’s 2020 conclusion that the evidence for mask effectiveness in reducing viral transmission was ‘weak’; Lady Hallett interjected, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not following … if there’s a possible benefit, what’s the downside? Horby responded to this challenge by suggesting that respect for institutional science was at stake – in keeping with the majority of the establishment scientists, he failed to highlight the considerable harms associated with routine masking.
The Inquiry’s pre-formed assumption that compelling people to wear face coverings was a public health intervention free of negative consequences was confirmed by the Module 2 report with its emphatic conclusions that:
‘The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that wearing a face covering has minimal disadvantage for the majority of the population.’
‘In any future pandemic where airborne transmission is a risk, the UK government and devolved administrations should give real consideration to mandating face coverings for the public in closed settings.’ (p. 288)
In conclusion, the overarching take-home message from the Inquiry to date is that public health strategy adopted by the government in response to the emergence of a novel virus in 2020 was essentially the correct one, and any criticism of the official covid narrative should be confined to process issues, such as the timing of restrictions. Devoid of any forensic analysis of their costs and benefits, Lady Hallett and her team have concluded that lockdowns, mRNA vaccines, and mask mandates all achieved positive outcomes and should therefore be repeated when we encounter the next ‘pandemic’. By amplifying voices supportive of the official covid narrative, while marginalising critical viewpoints, the Inquiry has succeeded in strengthening its – apparently pre-determined – perspective that, irrespective of any harms caused, the restrict-and-jab approach was, ultimately, for the greater good.
Most commentators who have been sceptical of the official covid narrative will not be surprised by the Inquiry’s conclusions. Given that the political elites, along with prominent public health mandarins, enthusiastically endorsed the calamitous restrictions and vaccine rollout (and continue to do so) the damage to the establishment of drawing different, more condemnatory, inferences would have been immense. From the perspective of our global leaders, the Inquiry to date is – no doubt – serving its primary purpose of concealing the true ramifications of the covid response from the general population.
Gary Sidley, PhD, is a former NHS consultant clinical psychologist with over 30-years’ experience of clinical, professional and managerial practice in adult mental health. In 2000, he obtained his PhD for a thesis exploring the psychological predictors of suicidal behaviour and has multiple mental health publications to his name, including academic papers, book chapters, and his own book, ‘Tales from the Madhouse: An insider critique of psychiatric services). Since the start of the covid event, he has written many articles critiquing the government’s nudge-infused messaging and mask mandates, including pieces for the Spectator, the Critic and Self & Society. More of his articles can be found on his ‘Manipulation of the Masses’ Substack.
NEW FAUCI EMAILS EXPOSE ATTACK ON NATURAL IMMUNITY
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | January 22, 2026
Newly revealed emails show Dr. Anthony Fauci privately acknowledged that natural immunity may provide stronger protection than COVID vaccination, even as he publicly dismissed it during the mandate period. As Senator Rand Paul calls for criminal referrals, the larger issue is whether the DOJ will pursue Fauci—or protect the COVID-era establishment instead.
The vindication (and brutal punishment) of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich
By Stephen Karganovic | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 23, 2025
Alongside the powers that be everywhere, Google’s still anonymous AI is also a pious believer in the virtues of free expression. It proclaims boldly and for all the right reasons that free speech is vital to democracy, in which it also claims to believe. It reminds us also, which is good to know, that freedom of expression promotes an informed citizenry and self-governance and ensures government accountability. Furthermore, that open dialogue and debate facilitate the “marketplace of ideas,” which is a vital condition for social progress and provides society with a much-needed “safety valve.” And finally, that the unhindered right to express one’s thoughts, beliefs, and values without fear is a fundamental aspect of human dignity and self-fulfilment. Amen, amen, amen.
In theory, all would heartily salute those noble sentiments. And that includes even some of their most ruthless violators, such as the German government.
For over a year after kidnapping him abroad, the German government kept prominent German lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich in prison on contrived charges and under extraordinarily harsh and inhuman conditions, which were seemingly designed just to torment him. In Germany, for Dr. Fuellmich at least, the right to express one’s thoughts with dignity (never mind self-fulfilment) in the manner so movingly preached by Google’s AI avatar went out the window many moons ago.
How many are there who still remember who Dr. Fuellmich is and what he stands for, let alone are aware of his current plight?
For those who do not, a brief note is in order. Shortly after the sudden appearance of the Covid affair in 2019, Dr. Fuellmich, a prominent trial attorney from Gottingen, gained public attention by raising sensible questions about the nature and origin of the commotion which was becoming global in scope. Identical questions were on the minds of many, but few were capable of articulating them in legal terms as effectively as he was. Initially, his questions were formulated rather timidly, barely overstepping the unspoken bounds of permissible inquiry. There was nigh a suggestion of any “conspiracy theory” or frontal challenge to the integrity of the system that in a matter of weeks had improvised, for purposes then still unknown, a global health emergency which was the pretext for unprecedentedly comprehensive social disruptions and the imposition of hitherto inconceivable restrictions on elementary human liberties.
As prominent professionals in the medical and other fields began also to sound the alarm and to raise questions from their respective areas of expertise, it became obvious to those who followed Reiner Fuellmich’s public pronouncements that both the direction and tone of the Covid inquiry he and his associates were pursuing were beginning to change. The issues he was now beginning to raise were no longer merely technical. Increasingly, as he dug deeper he was calling into question the bona fides of the political, media, and pharmaceutical intimidation machine that was invoking a supposed pandemic to implement a global lock-down regime, with compulsory mass injection of untested “therapeutic” substances.
Dr. Fuellmich’s basic questions about the “pandemic” are well worth recapitulating:
- “One: is there a corona pandemic, or is there only a PCR test pandemic, specifically, does a positive PCR test result mean that the person tested is infected with COVID-19, or does it mean absolutely nothing, in connection with the COVID-19 infection;
- “Two, do the so-called anti-corona measures, such as the lockdowns, facemasks, social distancing, and quarantine regulations serve to protect the world’s population from corona, or do they serve only to make people panic, so they believe, without asking any questions, that their lives are in danger, so that in the end, the pharmaceutical and technology companies can generate huge profits from the sale of PCR tests, antigen and antibody tests and vaccines, as well as the harvesting of our genetic fingerprints; and
- “Three, is it true that the German government was extensively lobbied, more so than any other government, by the chief protagonists of the so-called corona pandemic? Germany is known as a particularly disciplined country and was therefore to become a role model for the rest of the world, for its strict, and therefore, successful adherence to the corona measures.”
When, compelling as they evidently were, those interrogatories remained ignored in the public arena (whilst Dr. Fuellmich himself was being ridiculed and vilified just for asking) there began a perceptible shift in the scope and focus of his inquiry. His razor sharp legal mind was activated in the highest degree. The Establishment’s stonewalling on mostly softball issues gradually led him to undertake an unsparing in-depth scrutiny of the systemic background of the global Covid affair, fully intending to go to the root of it and leaving no stone unturned. Dr. Fuellmich threw the gauntlet when he announced that he was assembling evidence of crimes against humanity on a massive scale and of sufficient weight to convene a Medical Nuremberg II, with parallel criminal and class action proceedings that he intended to initiate in the judicial system of the United States and also before the European Court of Human Rights.
Dr. Fuellmich had stepped on some very sensitive and hostile toes. Clearly no such lunacy as he was contemplating could possibly be allowed. Plans were laid immediately to derail him by means of one of those shabby, low life operations in which secret services excel. Informants were planted in the target’s immediate circle to snitch on him and under false witness to furnish compromising evidence. A secret indictment (lettre de cachet, as this practice was known under the ancien regime in France and which recently was revived by the Hague Tribunal) for a purported money laundering scheme was duly prepared and German authorities waited for the convenient opportunity to catch their unsuspecting prey. That opportunity presented itself two years ago when Dr. Fuellmich, as a German citizen, appeared on the premises of the German consulate in Mexico (technically German territory, of course) to solicit a routine consular service. There, he was apprehended and promptly packed off to Germany to be disposed of as the German authorities saw fit. The only saving grace is that he was not snuffed and chopped up like the dissident journalist at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Following an unprecedented, almost two-year, pre-trial incarceration under medieval conditions that was seemingly devised especially for him (the old “flight risk” ruse was cited as the official rationale for this harsh measure) in April 2025 Dr. Fuellmich was finally sentenced to three years and nine months in prison on the bogus charges filed against him. On the surface, everything appears neat and proper. Technically, he was condemned for a crime of moral turpitude. His real “offence” against the vindictive globalist Establishment, the irrefutable public exposure of its totalitarian and population-reduction agenda and its corrupt liaison with the nefarious pharmacological mafia and compulsory promotion of its lethal products, was not even alluded to in the course of those proceedings. Yet, while Dr. Fuellmich is rotting in prison, every one of the principal claims for which he actually was imprisoned is now being scientifically corroborated.
The so-called “covid vaccines” are now known to be associated with heart damage, exactly as Dr. Fuellmich and numerous other researchers insistently warned during the “pandemic” (also here). As predicted by Dr. Fuellmich and his research team, a surge of life threatening blood clots has been correlated with the mass injection of untested “vaccines.” There has also been a marked acceleration of deadly cancer conditions. As further evidence of the fraudulence of the “pandemic emergency,” a peer reviewed study has demonstrated that 86% of allegedly PCR-positive “Covid cases” were not even real infections. That had originally been stated by Dr. Fuellmich, to widespread derision at the time. It is a fact that dismantles the scientific foundation used to justify lockdowns, social distancing, and vaccine mandates. And perhaps the most damning fact of all, Japanese scientists have demonstrated that contrary to disinformation about infected bats and unsanitary Chinese markets when the pandemic broke out, all known Covid variants are in fact of laboratory origin. That raises obvious and legitimate questions about criminal intent both on the level of the proposed “cures” and of the fabricated health emergency itself that those cures presumably were developed to resolve.
The vicious treatment allotted to the distinguished German lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is comparable to the persecution of figures like Giordano Bruno. It gives the lie to the collective West’s pharisaical pretence of freedom of expression. The dark stain it leaves will be indelibly recorded as a shameful episode in the history of German jurisprudence.
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From the Archives
UK Researchers: Tax Food to Reduce Climate Change
I doubt these professors have anything to fear from a food tax
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | November 19, 2016
A group of researchers in Oxford University, England have suggested that imposing a massive tax on carbon intensive foods – specifically protein rich foods like meat and dairy – could help combat climate change. […]
This proposal, from a group of people who have probably never missed a meal in their lives, is totally obscene. High income countries often have a lot of poor people who would be hard hit by increases in the price of food.
Needlessly exacerbating the risk poor people don’t get enough to eat, especially children and pregnant mothers, who are especially vulnerable to adverse health impacts from lack of protein in their diet – if this ghastly proposal is ever implemented, future generations will look upon it as a crime against humanity. – Read full article
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