Excess mortality researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., on Tuesday told Canadian lawmakers that national mortality statistics show “screaming safety signals” following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines — including increases in deaths among infants and children and increases in turbo cancers.
Testifying at Canada’s Allison Inquiry, Rancourt also argued that COVID-19-era government interventions — including lockdowns, isolating the elderly, closing businesses and withdrawing government support programs — also drove excess mortality during the pandemic.
Rancourt based his arguments on his analysis of official mortality data from Statistics Canada and in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He described how COVID-19 vaccines directly harmed individuals, and how specific pandemic policies caused broader societal harm.
His presentation came on the opening day of the Allison Inquiry, a four-day hearing chaired by Canadian Member of Parliament Dean Allison. The inquiry collected testimony from 50 Canadians injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with testimony from physicians, scientists and other witnesses.
4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. alone
Infant mortality had been declining in the U.S. before the pandemic. That trend reversed during the pandemic, according to Rancourt’s data — but not until 2022, nine months after COVID-19 vaccination was recommended for pregnant women.
Rancourt estimated the change represented approximately 4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. from 2022 to 2024.
He presented a similar case for Canada, although the raw numbers were much lower due to the smaller population. After Canada issued its vaccine guidance for pregnant women on May 28, 2021, he said mortality rose among infants, with a marked increase nine months after the recommendations.
He estimated there were 200 excess infant deaths in Canada during that time, with 10 excess pregnancy-related deaths.
Data show 2,000+ excess deaths among 1- to 4-year-olds in U.S.
Rancourt identified more than 2,000 excess deaths among children ages 1-4 in the U.S. between 2021 and 2024.
He attributed an initial increase in 2021 partly to the abrupt withdrawal of federal financial assistance in some states.
But Rancourt said the largest increase coincided with the June 17, 2022, authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for young children. Excess deaths peaked precisely with the vaccine rollout.
Canadian mortality data showed a similar age-specific pattern. Rancourt shared mortality trends for Canadian children ages 1-4, 5-9 and 10-14, showing each group experienced a pronounced increase during the year COVID-19 vaccines became available for that particular age group.
The spikes in excess mortality were “very sudden,” he said. The increases did not occur during the first two years of the pandemic, he emphasized.
“As soon as you vaccinated these age groups and not before, not when there was COVID, not in the first two years of the pandemic. But when you started vaccinating them, that is the signature that you see in the mortality [data],” Rancourt said. “It’s absolutely stunning.”
He estimated 410 excess deaths among Canadian children ages 1-14.
‘Turbo cancers’ and excess cancer deaths
Rancourt said that rapidly progressing cancers, also called “turbo cancers,” are not a new phenomenon. Scientific literature on “hyperprogressive disease,” or HPD, has reported such cancers in some patients undergoing immunotherapy since 2015, when the new treatments became available.
However, excess mortality data now show signals of an unusually aggressive increase in cancer mortality following the vaccine rollouts, according to Rancourt.
Rancourt identified more than 4,000 excess cancer deaths among Americans ages 5-44 during the study period. An estimated 960 of those were among young people ages 5-24. He highlighted a sharp increase in deaths from cancers of the long bones and limbs.
Rancourt called the increase “definitely a safety signal.”
He also estimated that 240 excess deaths among Americans ages 25-44 involved multiple primary cancers — separate primary tumors occurring in different organs rather than a single cancer metastasizing to other parts of the body.
Approximately 1,500 excess deaths due to these cancers occurred in people 75 and older. He said his research group has observed similar signals in Canada, but researchers are still analyzing those data.
It’s not just the vaccines — pandemic policies also linked to excess deaths
The second half of Rancourt’s presentation focused on an argument his research group has built over several years of excess mortality analysis — that government policy responses to COVID-19 caused excess mortality.
For example, his research team examined more than 80 province-specific socioeconomic variables in Canada to determine which were linked to excess mortality.
They found that excess mortality correlated strongly with GDP per capita. “The more wealth generation you have in the province, the more excess deaths you have,” he said.
He surmised that when the economy shut down in provinces with vibrant economies, it had devastating effects on workers and their families.
Policies designed to protect elderly contributed to their deaths
Rancourt compared weekly excess mortality with an Oxford University index measuring the intensity of measures intended to protect elderly people, including isolation and lockdown policies.
Increases in the severity of those measures corresponded with large mortality peaks, Rancourt said. Those peaks were then followed by periods of unusually low mortality.
“And that’s because you’ve killed so many people in that first peak that there’s less people of that age to die in the weeks that follow,” he said. “That’s called the dry tinder effect.”
He interpreted the pattern as evidence that measures intended to protect elderly Canadians instead contributed to their deaths.
During questioning after his presentation, Rancourt was asked whether that meant elderly people should not have been isolated and locked down.
“Absolutely,” he responded.
Rancourt said social isolation and severe stress can have profound physiological effects, particularly among vulnerable populations.
“If you had not tried to save the elderly by isolating them and locking them in” the mortality outcome would have been different, he said.
“You have to know that isolation kills,” he said. “This is unambiguous.”
Cutting financial support also correlated with deaths
Rancourt said another mortality signal appeared when governments withdrew pandemic-era financial assistance.
Canada and the U.S. initially provided enormous financial support to workers and families after governments shut down large portions of the economy.
Those programs were so effective that poverty actually declined in Canada during 2020 and 2021, when more than $1 trillion was given out, Rancourt said.
But mortality increased following major reductions in financial assistance, according to the data he presented.
“It’s worse if you give money, if you give support and you cut it, it’s worse than if you’d never given it,” Rancourt said.
No evidence of viral pandemic, Rancourt argued
Rancourt said his team’s all-cause mortality research across North America and Europe failed to show the mortality pattern that would be expected if a spreading respiratory virus were the primary cause of excess mortality.
Rancourt described the spread in mortality as “geostatic,” rather than “geotemporal” — meaning mortality sometimes appeared to peak in one geographic location without spreading into neighboring regions.
As an example, he cited the dramatic differences between the area around Milan in northern Italy, which experienced massive early mortality spikes, and Rome, which had no comparable event.
Both cities had similar demographics and similar types of exposure — through international airports and other types of transportation networks — but very different outcomes.
If there had been a viral disease, they should have seen a similar type of spread and similar mortality rates.
“Identical systems, identical types of societies, just as many poor, high-density urban areas,” he said.
Rancourt said the geographic patterns were “inconsistent with the accepted theory of how a virus spreads” through person-to-person respiratory transmission.
‘Assaults’ drove excess mortality, ‘not a virus’
Rancourt ended his presentation by telling the members of the inquiry that his research led him to conclude that government policies and toxic vaccines were to blame for excess deaths in the COVID-19 period.
He said:
“History will record that the COVID period was, in effect, a massive and unnecessary multifaceted assault against people, exploiting fear and causing harm, injury and death, especially in the most vulnerable. All governments under U.S. hegemony and media influence cooperated or imitated. Canada was no exception.
“The vaccines are toxic and caused many deaths and injuries in plain sight of robust national statistics.”
He listed economic shutdowns, fear, mandates, isolation, medical interventions and vaccination among the “assaults” that he believes, based on the data he analyzed, caused excess mortality.
Rancourt singled out COVID-19 vaccination as the most devastating. Unlike other pandemic measures, it involved administering a pharmaceutical product directly to large numbers of healthy as well as vulnerable people, including elderly people, pregnant women and children.
Rancourt conceded that excess mortality data cannot, on their own, conclusively prove what caused individual deaths. He argued instead that uncertainty about causation should not become a reason to ignore unusual population-level signals.
“Science can never prove causality,” Rancourt said. But institutional capture can “always minimize and invalidate screaming safety signals and personal hardship.”
The patterns he presented should have triggered investigation and changes in government policy, he said.
“These are the signals I showed you today,” Rancourt said. They “needed to be acknowledged right away and used to change government and medical establishment behavior.”
The legal pressure surrounding the COVID origins controversy continues to build. Jefferey follows newly surfaced emails, shifting alliances, and the growing list of figures facing uncomfortable questions about what happened behind the scenes.
There is a vast difference between believing in witches and embarking on a witch hunt. While belief in witches likely prevailed throughout most of human history, mass hysteria driving a hunt for them is rare. The case of wokeness points to a similar dynamic: since the 1960s, U.S. institutions have propagated a conspiratorial sociology and a Manichaean anthropology worldwide, positing that Christendom, across all eras, has been inherently hostile toward women, blacks and gays. Yet, it was only in the 2010s, spurred by social media, that a significant segment of society began looking for racists under the bed and denouncing them everywhere. The onset of this hysteria coincided with the Euromaidan protests (2014), and represented the U.S. as a beacon of freedom standing against oppression. Moscow, the traditional villain, ceased to be viewed as communist and came to be seen as homophobic.
Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to suggest that the “woke” phenomenon was merely a pandemic-induced delusion. While that isn’t strictly true, the lie gains traction because people were indeed not their usual selves during the pandemic, and wokeness was in full swing. I would venture to identify the George Floyd protests—which emerged in the U.S. in 2020 and were almost instantly replicated across Western Europe—as the peak of this pandemic-era delirium. There was even an attempt to stage a Brazilian version in São Paulo, led by soccer fan groups claiming to fight for democracy (this was during the Bolsonaro administration, which the most radical woke adherents viewed as a dictatorship). I single this out as the height of the madness because the press had spent the preceding months practically branding anyone who dared step outside a murderer, yet suddenly, taking to the streets to form a mob and topple “racist” statues was treated almost as a civic duty. Schools and churches were shut down because they caused “crowding,” yet gathering in crowds to vandalize the city was given the green light. Woke pedagogy and religion were the only forms of expression permitted in the public square.
The George Floyd protests also help clarify one thing: during the pandemic, traditional media acted as the catalyst for mass hysteria. While mainstream media certainly embraced wokeness, it is widely acknowledged that the driving force behind this hysteria was social media—specifically Facebook and Twitter. Traditional media generally followed suit rather than taking the lead: TV networks would have anchors spout politically correct platitudes while discussing the news or feature black women or Asian gays in prominent roles, but they were not the ones instigating cancel culture campaigns. As far as I recall, it was only during the pandemic that traditional media began actively inciting “woke” demonstrations, thereby assuming a position of genuine leadership. The Black Lives Matter organization lacked CNN’s mobilizing power; in Brazil, the Corinthians fan base lacked Globo’s reach.
The segments of the population led by traditional media differ from those led by social media influencers. The former group is much larger, considerably older, and far less politicized. Yet, during the pandemic, the two groups converged, moving in the same direction.
The discovery of Fauci’s diary compels us to revisit that period in history. Fauci kept an online diary on a government server, where he recorded his impressions of press coverage, his personal feelings, and so on. No hacking was required to uncover this information; one simply had to consult U.S. government servers, where Fauci’s emails and messages were also stored. Currently, there is a U.S. Senate investigation into this individual’s conduct during the pandemic, and this inquiry has uncovered matters of the utmost gravity. For instance, Fauci was privately warned that the experimental COVID “vaccines” could cause miscarriages, yet publicly he insisted they posed no risk and should be taken by pregnant women. As someone who is not a doctor, I take pride in having spoken out in 2021 against the propaganda made by YouTube for pregnant women, which offered them unrealistic assurances of safety. Time has proven me right, yet any expectation of a mea culpa is in vain.
One of the few topics from the Senate committee investigations that the mainstream media has touched upon is the laboratory origin of the coronavirus. So-called “conspiracy theorists” had long known that Fauci funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan; however, only now—with the release of correspondence revealing Fauci’s efforts to enforce the “bat soup” narrative—has the mainstream media begun to feign surprise at the subject. The U.S. creating biological weapons in overseas labs? Never! That would be conspiracy theory territory; instead, call it “gain-of-function research”, where selfless scientists simply play the role of nature by creating new, lethal viruses, all to discover a vaccine in advance, for the good of humanity.
When I was a child, there was enough medical information available to know that the flu vaccine was always lagging behind, because the flu virus is constantly mutating—yet now I am expected to believe that gain-of-function research offers a realistic prospect of anticipating the wildest viruses nature would have cooked up anyway. God forbid we believe Russia’s allegations regarding biolabs in Ukraine! Or rather, God forbid we even become aware of them!
Ever since the emergence of these hastily developed, mandatory vaccines, it became clear to me that there was a geopolitical divide far more significant than the one between Right and Left. In Brazil, for instance, skepticism became associated with the Bolsonarist Right, whereas the Left embraced the Democrats’ narrative en masse. Yet, I observed that Cuba and Venezuela were using chloroquine. Where Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are present, U.S. influence prevails; where such vaccines are absent—and where seeking off-label treatments is not taboo—U.S. influence does not prevail.
Commenting on the latest news regarding Fauci, a rare article published by Opera Mundi (one of the few Brazilian leftist outlets sympathetic to Chavismo) stated: “The controversy surrounding biolabs became one of the most intense political debates in the U.S. during the pandemic. The ‘bat theory’ was automatically linked to Democratic progressivism, while any mention of biolabs was dismissed as yet another piece of Trumpist fake news. Since then, the goal has no longer been to uncover the truth, but to stake out a position against the opposing camp. In Brazil, this importation of ‘ideas out of place’ was even more clumsy than Roberto Schwarz could have imagined. We didn’t even copy the new phase of the controversy; we preferred to pretend nothing happened.”
This is the state of affairs in Brazil: if it didn’t air on Jornal Nacional, it didn’t happen; it’s all just fake news from crude right-wingers. A state investigation by the world’s greatest power, conducted by representatives of the people—that simply didn’t happen. As a large, monolingual country that does not, in practice, require its middle class to know English, Brazil is susceptible to this dynamic.
Take, for instance, the day I tried to show a doctor that I was right and she was wrong regarding COVID vaccines. I was astonished to find her literally offended because I shared news reports that contradicted her beliefs; she invoked the argument of freedom of conscience—typical of religious warfare—when, in reality, the issue involved simple factual matters that should be verifiable by atheists and believers of all stripes alike. A lack of broader knowledge made any English-language website suspect—even the New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton. The doctor in question, as is common among her social class, opposes to Lula’s Party. The non-Bolsonarist Brazilian right is also staunchly pro-COVID vaccine (see the stances of former Governor Ronaldo Caiado and movement leader Renan Santos, both of whom run for presidency). This is a right-wing faction that adores the U.S., loathes Trump, and finds itself uncomfortable with shifting geopolitical realities.
If there is one thing that unites adherents of this right-wing faction with the left in general—especially the “woke” left—it is the conviction that they are more enlightened than the average person, standing on a plane far above the common rabble. In a sense, Trumpism in the U.S. and Bolsonarism in Brazil serve to create a straw man—the uncultured, utter ignoramus—against whom the conformist citizen, devoid of any particular virtue, can feel special simply by comparison. It is an ego crutch. I am not sure if this maps perfectly onto the New Right parties in Europe; given the vigorous prevalence of wokeness in the European Union, a conformist citizen need only label someone a fascist or a racist to feel superior to many of their fellow countrymen.
The years of pandemic mass hysteria have crystallized into a cult of Fauci followers whose self-worth hinges on their beliefs regarding the pandemic. These are people who believe that only what appears in the mainstream media is true; who think that without the arrival of the “vaccines,” COVID would still be highly lethal today (surely the Brazilian Indians invented the flu vaccine in the 16th century, thereby avoiding extinction); who believe that when they are afraid, it is right and necessary to sacrifice the lives of healthy young people, who notoriously would not have died from COVID, for the sake of their own emotional comfort (from the start of the pandemic, it was widely known that the elderly and the obese were the most vulnerable—yet, before the Ozempic fad, telling someone to lose weight was “fatphobia”). And later, once they have blood on their hands, having engaged in or legitimized a witch hunt against the unvaccinated and skeptics in general, they deem it right and necessary to uphold the lie so they can maintain that emotional comfort.
It is difficult to envision a solution for these people. Just as crack addicts will use every last cent to numb themselves, these conformists with inflated egos will use any pretext to cling to their own beliefs. This situation is all the more serious given the medical community’s widespread adherence to this creed. It means that many of our so-called doctors are nothing more than pharmaceutical propagandists, lacking the competence and critical judgment to act in accordance with the Hippocratic Oath.
Now that the lofty 250th-anniversary rhetoric about the greatness of our country has faded, it is time to face the reality of our country’s actual behavior. The U.S. fashions itself as a generous and benevolent world leader enforcing the “rules-based order”—a deceptive construct used by globalist elites to bully other countries. The rules are arbitrarily changed to suit the bullies and are regularly fashioned into pretexts for military action against uncooperative nations. In short, it is a hoax, untethered from the principles and ideals of our founders.
Almost daily we witness some spectacle illustrating the appalling corruption of our country’s leadership. The recent release of Anthony Fauci’s diary entries confirms long-held suspicions about the Covid-19 narrative, which we now know even Fauci himself did not fully believe. Think of the millions of lives ruined and harmed by that corruption. Yet this vain phony, when asked to testify before Congress, hid behind half a dozen lawyers and refused to answer any questions. What a fine example of transparency from one of our leading scientists and civil servants! What else are our leaders still hiding about the worldwide disaster caused by Covid-related deceptions and manipulations? There has not yet been any meaningful examination of our medical profession, which largely acted as cowards during the pandemic, adhering to the bogus official narrative at the expense of the welfare of their patients.
Our leadership has not even begun to scratch the surface of the horrors created by the many secret—and potentially illegal—biolabs scattered around the globe, supported by funds often hidden from voters under the guise of “national security.” The Fauci crowd appears to have been deeply involved in that dark world.
America’s Middle East policy remains a source of shame. The U.S. Treasury secretary brags about ruining the currency of the Iranian people, against whom we have waged a war of aggression. In Gaza, Washington has enabled a brutal assault on a vulnerable population. Not many years ago, most Americans considered standing up for the vulnerable and innocent an honorable act of a true American. Not our leaders. These days, opposing the harm of politically inconvenient innocents attracts name-calling, ostracism, and sanctions. What would our Founding Fathers have thought of that?
The current wars have exposed the shortcomings of our nearly trillion-dollar military and its multi-billion-dollar weapons systems. If the Covid mess is any indication, we should assume there is hidden and shockingly ugly information about the behavior and practices of the military-industrial complex. The failure of our various expensive defense systems to protect our Persian Gulf “allies” from Iranian missile and drone attacks is a tragic example of government dishonesty. Despite repeated failures, the administration continues to brag of its ability to destroy Iran’s military and shoot down its remaining missiles and drones. After years of being told we possess the “most powerful military” in history, Americans are beginning to realize it is a fantasy. The success of that false narrative rests on decades of fighting people riding donkeys and bicycles.
Our government classifies and redacts documents as a matter of course. Think of the billions of pages we are still not allowed to see—especially information about the most important events in our country’s history. Many significant, history-changing events remain shrouded in secrecy. How is it that information is still being withheld about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? After six decades, what bad behavior are they still “protecting” from the public? Most Americans suspect the official government narrative was false, yet officials continue to withhold information that might shed light on that crime. The same is true for the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., our government’s willful abandonment of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam, the September 11 attacks, and the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Not to mention the disgusting manipulations and secret operations used to drag our country into the long list of dishonest, illegal, and failed wars we have “fought.”
Our political leadership’s frenzied efforts to hide the Epstein files make it look as though the “national security” excuse is merely a convenient tool to obscure malfeasance, rape, blackmail, bribery, and plain old corruption. They clearly believe they are not subject to the same pesky and inconvenient laws as the rest of us who live in the country. So much for equal protection under the law and the “rules-based order.”
We watch with horror the chaos, death, and destruction currently being wreaked on the world—and on our own country—by our “exceptional nation.” Why has the second Trump administration bombed at least seven countries and engaged in underhanded efforts to weaken and harm the political systems of others? None of this serves the interests of the American people; it serves only the special interests of our elites. All this from a president who campaigned on an America First policy, an end to forever wars, and the promotion of peace. It looks like we were fooled again. Presidential candidate after presidential candidate promises peace, and we get war after war. The system is subverted by corruption.
As the failure of the illegal war against Iran becomes increasingly obvious, more Americans are realizing that it in no way serves their interests. As the war against Russia in Ukraine grinds toward failure, American and European leaders continue more frantically than ever to promote the fantasy that Ukraine can defeat Russia in that sad and disastrous conflict.
There is one positive development: The American people, especially the younger generation, are beginning to recognize the corruption at the top of our country and the magnitude of the war lies. They understand that the special interests driving these belligerent policies care nothing about the well-being of the general populace or of our nation. There has always been skepticism toward powerful special interests, but we are moving past skepticism into righteous fury.
This is also true of our “allies,” who watched U.S. elites prioritize Israel over American security when the missiles started flying.
Ours is not an “exceptional nation.” It is not the “shining city on a hill.” It is not “a thousand points of light.” Not anymore. It is a declining empire with a declining military—one unable to protect its allies, yet still seeking to bully and harm any country that angers its corrupt elites.
Our military defenses are so ineffective that Iran—a country one-fourth our size, with an economy smaller than our bloated military budget—can practically name its next round of targets knowing our mighty military can do little to stop them.
With a governing elite that serves foreign and special interests rather than the people and a sweeping surveillance state that stretches from sea to shining sea, Americans are becoming increasingly disillusioned. A sobering question to consider: When the illusion finally shatters, who will be left willing to defend a government that wouldn’t defend its own?
George D. O’Neill, Jr., is a member of the board of directors of the American Ideas Institute, which publishes The American Conservative, and an artist who lives in rural Florida.
A former key adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci pled guilty to concealing public records related to the origins of COVID-19 in a plea deal reached with federal prosecutors — a development some political figures and analysts suggest could implicate Fauci.
Dr. David Morens pled guilty Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. According to The Washington Post, Morens, 78, told a federal judge he attempted to bypass federal recordkeeping laws by using his private email account to discuss research — and a terminated federal grant — related to COVID-19’s origins.
Morens, initially indicted in April on five federal charges, told the judge he intentionally redirected communications to his personal email account to protect Fauci and because the emails might be misinterpreted in the future, if and when they were publicly released.
Court filings show some of the emails were back-channeled to a senior official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). According to CBS News, the official is likely Fauci, who directed NIAID until December 2022. Morens served as senior adviser in Fauci’s NIAID office between 2006 and 2022.
Morens diverted messages to his personal email while speculation swirled around whether COVID-19 emerged in nature, as Fauci and other Biden administration officials and key virologists publicly asserted at the time, or was developed at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and leaked from there.
Morens faces up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 under the terms of the plea deal, though his sentence may be shorter. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), “actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties.” Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 12, Politico reported.
“By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so,” Tim Belevetz, Morens’ attorney, said in a statement cited by the Post.
James Billot, editor of UnHerd, told Australia’s News24 Digital that Morens’ guilty plea represents the “first big scalp” in the COVID-19 origins investigation. “We are going to see a lot more of this thing coming out soon.”
According to Politico, Fauci was not “charged with or accused of wrongdoing in the case against Morens and is not referred to by name in court filings.”
But in a post on X, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is leading the congressional COVID-19 origins investigation, suggested Fauci may be implicated: “Long-time Fauci ally pleads guilty. Could his plea involve implicating Anthony Fauci?” Paul wrote.
Morens boasted about being able to ‘make emails disappear’
During testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024, Fauci denied he had a close working relationship with Morens, suggesting that Morens did not advise him on “institute policy or other substantive issues.”
However, Morens’ plea deal includes a statement that he often consulted with an outside researcher, Peter Daszak, Ph.D., then-president of the EcoHealth Alliance, to prepare briefings for Fauci that would suggest COVID-19 had natural origins.
In a 2021 email released by the House and cited by The Hill, Morens told Daszak, “I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
In another 2021 email, Morens said he knew how to “make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d” — referring to Freedom of Information Act requests for federal records.
John Leake, vice president of the McCullough Foundation and author of “Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions,” wrote on Substack that Morens’ guilty plea to a single conspiracy charge is “akin to Al Capone being convicted for income tax evasion.” Leake suggested the plea will have minimal impact on the COVID-19 origins probe.
“Though Morens will likely serve time behind bars, his guilty plea and his punishment for this particular act of fraud strike me as a distraction from the elephant in the room,” Leake wrote — referring to “the illegal creation and subsequent illegal concealment of a bio-weapon in a Chinese biosecurity lab.”
But for other analysts and commentators, attention is swirling back to Fauci in the aftermath of Morens’ guilty plea.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, suggested Morens has likely agreed to testify against other figures in exchange for his plea deal and possibly a more lenient sentence.
“He is now ready to talk in exchange for a lighter sentence. He surely will talk and it will be fascinating to know everything he knows,” Tucker said.
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., agreed. Ebright has been a vocal critic of gain-of-function research, which lab-leak theory proponents have suggested likely resulted in the laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2 and its subsequent leak from the Wuhan lab.
He said Morens “likely” acted “under orders from his boss — Fauci.”
Ebright said:
“Morens’ guilty plea is an important first step in holding accountable the malfeasant U.S. officials who funded the reckless gain-of-function research in Wuhan that caused COVID-19.
“It seems possible, even likely, that Morens has been ‘flipped’ by prosecutors, and that Morens’ guilty plea is the product of a plea bargain in which Morens has agreed to testify against Fauci, Daszak … and others.”
Morens’ plea deal included a sealed file, which Ebright suggested indicates Morens has agreed to testify against others — a view supported by research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., who wrote on Substack:
“Finally, because the plea agreement incorporates a sealed supplement and a separate factual stipulation, the currently public record is incomplete. That gap matters especially to speculation that Morens is cooperating against others. Such cooperation is possible in the abstract but cannot responsibly be asserted from the sealed filing’s existence alone. …
“ … We predicted that [Morens] would be offered a plea deal and specific charges dropped in exchange for testimony against Fauci and others.”
Morens received gifts for ‘behind-the-scenes shenanigans’
The indictment against Morens extensively referenced two co-conspirators, referred to as “Co-Conspirator 1” and “Co-Conspirator 2.”
According to the Post, documents released as part of the congressional investigation indicate the two people in question are Daszak and Dr. Gerald Keusch, former director of the NIH Fogarty International Center, which funded foreign scientists.
Morens, Daszak and Keusch “repeatedly discussed limiting their conversations to private email,” the Postreported.
Under Daszak’s leadership, the EcoHealth Alliance received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — NIAID’s parent agency — for a study titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The Wuhan lab later received a subaward from EcoHealth Alliance funded by the grant.
As part of his plea deal, Morens acknowledged that he received “illegal gratuities” from Daszak — including meals at Michelin-starred restaurants and bottles of wine — to thank him for his “advice, support, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans” in helping Daszak “restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.”
According to the DOJ, “Morens then allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was to author a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.”
Tucker said Morens was “once a promising intellectual” who “turned to the dark side” by acting on “Fauci’s orders” — including publishing journal articles supporting the establishment COVID-19 narrative.
Tucker cited a September 2020 article Morens co-authored with Fauci and published in the journal Cell, calling for “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence.”
“It was dystopian to the extreme and he knew it,” Tucker said. “It reflected his mood — absurdity in the service of power.”
Will other Fauci aides vie to ‘rat each other out’ in exchange for plea deals?
Morens’ guilty plea is the latest development in the ongoing congressional investigation into COVID-19’s origins. In 2024, when he testified before Congress as part of the investigation, Morens denied trying to bypass federal law by routing communications through his personal email account.
Earlier this month, Paul referred Fauci for prosecution on contempt of Congress charges for refusing to answer questions during last month’s hearing. According to the Post, the DOJ is reviewing the request. It’s the third time Paul has referred Fauci to the DOJ for possible criminal charges.
In the waning moments of his administration last year, then-President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci for all of his official acts dating back to 2014 — the year that the NIH approved a grant for Daszak’s bat coronavirus research.
Legal experts previously told The Defender that while the pardon shields Fauci from federal prosecution for his official acts, it does not prevent states from filing charges against Fauci. And it does not shield him from contempt of Congress charges or perjury in subsequent testimony.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suspended all funding for EcoHealth Alliance after finding the organization had failed to properly monitor coronavirus experiments.
In April, the NIH reportedly pulled all grants issued to virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., who worked with Fauci and researchers at the Wuhan lab before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Documents released last month suggest that in 2021, the FBI pressured U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents not to question Daszak on his return to the U.S. from China, where he had traveled as part of a World Health Organization investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
Last year, Daszak became president of Nature.Health.Global — a nonprofit that performs research on public health and pandemic prevention. Morens works for the nonprofit.
Ebright suggested that the “rat race now is on” for Fauci’s former close aides and allies to “rat each other out.”
“Morens, Daszak, Keusch and the others likely already are vying to be first to flip and thereby to snag the best plea deals.”
The pandemic is over. Yet two key pieces remain that should concern everyone.
Lets talk about the COVID shot. Still being mandated (recommended) by East and West Coast Health Alliances comprising 14 states all the way down to infants.
Why? To stick it to Kennedy? To ‘follow the science’‘? To secure a market as demand tanks? Who knows for sure but here we are.
The COVID shot was birthed in fraud and failed science. That is the true legacy media pundits won’t tell you.
As the first cases of coronavirus happened in the U.S., Moderna and Pfizer began designing their mRNA vaccine candidates.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates pulled the trigger. A Fauci files/diary email from Gates to Fauci asks the NIAID director for “changes or additions” to Gates’ masterplan titled simply Pandemic I.
Gates’ document, given the stamp of approval from Fauci, stated:
“The goal is to pick the one or two best vaccine constructs and vaccinate the entire world—that’s 7 billion doses if it is a single-dose vaccine, and 14 billion if it is a two-dose vaccine.
How about 9-12 doses? That is what has been recommended to date for adults and immunocompromised respectively.
Far from a stranger, Gates and his foundation were fraudulently close to U.S. agencies funding pieces of NIH and receiving private briefings from DARPA on biological threats. More on that in another report.
FAUCI KILLS EARLY TREATMENT
Under Section 564 of the FD&C Act, FDA can grant the emergency use for a medical countermeasure (the vaccine) because, as revisionist history tells, there was no approved alternatives adequately available for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease.
The guidelines and experiences used at the start of the pandemic from pioneers like Peter McCullough’s protocol, New York family physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s protocol, Texas Dr. Richard Bartlett nebulized budesonide, Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’s ivermectin push and so many others using similar treatments with repeated success and real-world results tells a different story.
Evidence that would have effectively ended the FDA EUA vaccine hunt.
Didn’t matter to Fauci and the captured U.S. regulatory agencies. Their job was to kill those ideas and pave the way for the coming experimental, world-injecting gene therapy.
Fauci files/diary explains how it was done at the highest level. March 2020, two months into the first U.S. cases Fauci finds himself in a high-level White House Meeting and writes:
“A friend of POTUS… said that he heards [sic] that someone gave Hydroxychloroquine (HC) to 51 people and 51 got better. POTUS has heard similar stories, including Remdesivir (R) about other drugs and wants to make these available. To my amazement and dismay, Azar said that he could approve HC and Remdesivir now with the powers that he has. Steve Hahn and to some extent Deb and Bob started to chime in that this would give people hope. I took a deep breath and said that this was wrong and should not be done.”
None of the trials were designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor were the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus. (*I was the first journalist to report this in October 2020)
FDA and VRBPAC votes were near unanimous to get them to market and in American arms while legacy media ‘journalists’ and their ‘experts’ like Fauci and others touted the shot’s transmission-stopping magical qualities. While Influencers and celebrities sucked up $911 million of taxpayer money for their injectable PR efforts.
There was just one problem. The shot didn’t stop transmission. And it didn’t perform against mutations. In short, it was worthless and gave false hope with a growing profile of side effects (harms).
September 2021 Fauci writes:
“… there is a concern about safety regarding myocarditis for younger people, mostly men; however, once this is taken care of in my mind there is no reason not to vaccinate essentially everyone.”
Heart damage from the shot was never “taken care of” and still remains a concern and risk to this day especially for young men.
January 2021, world-renowned HIV virus researcher Dr. David Ho shares immediate concerns about the COVID shot’s performance according to Fauci’s diary:
“David Ho is doing tests on convalescent sera and sera of people who were vaccinated and is finding disturbing data in both the UK and worse in the RSA mutants. It looks like the vaccine might be compromised.”
Fauci continues:
“Had regular every 2 weeks call with Bill Gates – Bill and Trevor Mundel know about the issue with the mutations that David Ho is working on.”
What exactly were Dr. Ho’s warnings? Dr. Ho writes to Fauci the following:
“It is quite clear that these two variants could now resist several classes of neutralizing monoclonal antibodies already used in the clinic or still in development, and in most cases we understand which of the mutations are conferring the resistance.”
Ho continues:
“… a large majority of convalescent plasma samples showed an appreciable loss in activity against the new variants, suggesting re-infection may be more likely when confronted with either of these two strains.”
And then the death blow to the non-transmission-stopping COVID shot as Ho writes:
“Finally, we also observed a significant impact on vaccinee sera in that every serum sample tested showed a substantial loss in neutralizing activity against the SA variant, whereas the loss in activity against the UK virus is not as large or as universal. Again, we believe the latter findings should be shared promptly with the field, because these new strains threaten the effectiveness of the current vaccines.”
The very next day, Fauci writes in his diary:
“Had Zoom briefing of Biden and Harris to prep them for the speech that Biden will give at 3:45 PM on the vaccine rollout plan. We briefed him at 2:30 to 3:30 and he and Harris (only he spoke) gave briefing to the Nation.”
No word of the vaccine issues, mutations or danger now scientifically evident.
It later became clear that Ho was not only right, but his warnings were mild compared to the reality that unfolded. UK COVID vaccine surveillance data began showing the shots were not only failing to prevent infection but they are making you more vulnerable to it.
2022 data suggested that in all age groups COVID vaccines were demonstrating negative efficacy. That means, the vaccinated were at greater risk of infection than the unvaccinated.
Meanwhile, that same year Fauci writes:
“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… 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…
Why? As Fauci writes, “it would undermine the DoJ’s efforts at mandates for vaccines under certain circumstances.”
In the end, CDC director at the time Walensky who, as Fauci writes, called him “… her hero, her mentor, her friend… agreed to pull back on the statement of absolute lack of efficacy of vaccines against infections and transmission.”
Throughout all this, Fauci went to bat for Big Pharma indemnity in 2021 as he pens in his diary:
“I had an important zoom meeting today with Larry Corey an Emilio Emini about the same subject as above, namely, how the United states can play a major proactive role in getting mRNA vaccines to the developing world. Apparently there are liability issues that the pharmaceutical companies are concerned with. These revolve around the fact that although the United States government can indemnify the companies against lawsuits here in the United states the companies feel that they are liable to being sued for adverse outcomes by people in the countries to whom they’re providing vaccine. Some mechanism needs to be worked out to address this concern.”
(Emilio Emini was Chief Executive Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute and Larry Corey head of COVID-19 Prevention Network collaboration formed by Fauci)
The shot is still protected by the PREP Act which was extended until 2029 by outgoing HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (now in the running for California Governor).
The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) meant to field harms from the COVID shot is a black hole and sick joke. Kennedy is attempting to create a table of accepted injuries to ease compensation efforts for the injured public. Is this enough? Not by a long shot.
(*No artificial intelligence was used to write this article. Just a genuine human… me)
The US Senate Homeland Security Committee has voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt after the former White House coronavirus czar refused to answer questions on the origins of Covid-19 at a hearing last week.
The Republican-led committee voted 8-7 along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt on Thursday. The committee’s Democrats introduced five motions aimed at postponing the vote, but all were shut down by the Republican majority.
Fauci appeared before the committee last Wednesday, where he was grilled on his role in funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, his knowledge that Covid-19 was likely created in a laboratory, his work with US intelligence agencies, and his promotion of ineffective vaccines against the virus.
The former bureaucrat refused to answer any questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right to silence more than 100 times. Fauci pleaded the Fifth despite having already received a pardon from former President Joe Biden shielding him from criminal prosecution over any offense committed between January 1, 2014 – when the US first outsourced gain-of-function research to China – and January 20, 2025.
“More than a million Americans died from Covid,” committee chairman Rand Paul said before Thursday’s vote. “Many of them died alone. Workers were forced to choose between a mandate and a job they needed. Businesses closed and never reopened. Americans lost the freedom to work, to worship, and to decide what went into their own bodies.”
“Dr. Fauci faced no risk of federal prosecution,” Paul continued. “All he had to do was tell the truth.”
Although Fauci is immune from prosecution for any misdeeds that he committed between 2014 and 2025, his pardon does not cover any crimes committed at last week’s hearing. Contempt of Congress is a criminal offense, and Paul referred Fauci’s case to the US Justice Department immediately after Thursday’s vote.
Should the department choose to prosecute, Fauci could face a fine of up to $100,000 and a prison sentence of up to 12 months.
Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both former aides to US President Donald Trump, were jailed for contempt of Congress by Biden’s Justice Department. Navarro and Bannon both spent four months in prison in 2024.
Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, and as chief medical adviser to Biden from 2021 until his retirement in 2022. In the latter role, Fauci became the face of Biden’s heavy-handed response to the pandemic, advocating mask and vaccine mandates and lockdowns, and dismissing opposition to these measures as “anti-science.”
Deborah Birx got a hero’s welcome on News Nation, claiming she never understood how the country went from slowing the spread to a full shutdown, and pointing to Fauci’s private calls with governors and mayors as the cause. Jefferey Jaxen pulls up the actual headlines and timeline on the woman who was named White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, and it tells a very different story.
The U.K. government recommended a risky drug combination for COVID-19 patients in 2020, just 16 days after warning doctors to use the medications together only as a last resort, medical commentator John Campbell, Ph.D., said this week.
For years, Campbell has criticized the widespread use of midazolam and morphine and other palliative drugs to treat COVID-19 patients, questioning why so many patients appeared to receive drugs commonly associated with end-of-life care — even though they didn’t necessarily have a terminal illness.
But in his latest video, he said he had overlooked a key piece of the puzzle: The U.K. government itself had backed guidance recommending the combined use of opioids and benzodiazepines for certain COVID-19 patients — just days after warning that the drug combination could cause fatal respiratory depression.
Campbell, who said a former member of the British Parliament brought the issue to his attention, called the apparent reversal “a national scandal which is being ignored.” … Full article
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.”
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.
In August 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci received a U.S. intelligence report suggesting the COVID-19 virus was developed in Chinese and U.S. labs as a bat vaccine, that it subsequently leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that it contained characteristics that would make it resistant to mRNA vaccines.
The report, authored by Joseph Murphy, a major with the U.S. Marine Corps, and printed on Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) letterhead, was part of a tranche of documents Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released Thursday as part of his ongoing congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
The documents show that not only did Fauci receive the DARPA report, but that in an Aug. 25, 2021, email to National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials, he called it “important.” “Let us discuss my going down to the White House to review the report,” Fauci wrote.
The document tranche also contained evidence that Fauci cultivated ties with intelligence agencies at least as early as 2003, the same year he received a CIA report warning of the dangers of genetically manipulating coronaviruses.
Fauci later used these intelligence connections to sway the intelligence community to support the zoonotic theory of COVID-19’s origin, the documents show.
The newly released information corroborates the testimony of CIA whistleblower James Erdman before the U.S. Senate last month. Erdman testified that Fauci led a multi-agency cover-up of COVID-19’s lab origins and that his role in the cover-up “was intentional.”
“These documents reveal a breathtaking level of manipulation — official narratives carefully engineered to shape high-level government policy,” said Stephanie Weidle, executive director of federal watchdog group Feds for Freedom. “This is corruption.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the revelations sound “more like a plan than a mistake or a ‘leak.’” He said:
“You can’t tell me that the scientists involved didn’t know what the outcome would be. The combination of the human recombinant virus … and a gene therapy ‘vaccine’ that was used to circumvent all other therapies that could have saved lives, created a monster of a virus, as SARS-CoV-2 mutated to stay beyond the reach of the shot.”
Paul released the documents just days after he revealed that he intends to interview Fauci in Congress later this month. In a letter to Paul dated June 9, Sen. Gary C. Peters (D-Mich.) referenced Paul’s “planned transcribed interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci later this month.”
No further information about this interview is publicly available as of press time. The Daily Caller first reported about the forthcoming interview on Tuesday. Sen. Paul’s office did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
Fauci accepted proposal for gain-of-function research involving bat viruses
According to the DARPA document (see page 70), dated Aug. 13, 2021, SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, “is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus.”
It was created at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, also known as the WIV, and U.S. institutions with the help of researchers from the EcoHealth Alliance. The virus then leaked from the Wuhan lab in August 2019.
“The details of this program have been concealed since the pandemic began,” the document states, noting, though, that the details match those contained in two research proposals, the DEFUSE proposal and the PREEMPT project.
The EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal involved altering bat viruses by inserting a spike protein with a furin cleavage site, to cause the virus to infect human lungs. PREEMPT involved the cultivation of Egyptian fruit bats.
University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., and Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., submitted the DEFUSE proposal to DARPA in 2017. Although DARPA rejected the proposal, scientists have suggested the rejection didn’t shut down the project.
After DARPA rejected the DEFUSE proposal, the Aug. 13, 2021, report states that DARPA then “settled with NIH/NIAID” — or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led at the time by Fauci. According to the report:
“DARPA rejected the proposal because the work was too close to violating the gain-of-function (GoF) moratorium, … despite what Peter Daszak says in the proposal (that the work would not … ).
“As is known, Dr. Fauci with NIAID did not reject the proposal. The work took place at the WIV and at several sites in the US, identified in detail in the proposal.”
Baric and Fauci also closely collaborated with Peter Daszak, Ph.D. — the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, who had financial ties to the Wuhan Lab and played a key role in promoting the zoonotic theory.
In 2024, HHS suspended funding for the EcoHealth Alliance for not monitoring the safety of its coronavirus experiments.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus was likely intended to be used for a bat vaccine before it leaked from the Wuhan lab, according to the DARPA report. “The purpose of the EcoHealth program, called DEFUSE in the proposal … was to inoculate bats in the Yunnan, China caves where confirmed SARS-CoVs were found,” the report states.
However, the virus “leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves, but it was not ready to infect bats yet, which is why it does not appear to infect bats.”
The report suggests that SARS-CoV-2 had characteristics that made it easily transmissible among human populations.
“The reason the disease is so confusing is because it is less a virus than it is engineered spike proteins hitch-hiking a ride on a SARSr-CoV quasispecies swarm. The closer it is to the final live attenuated vaccine form, the more likely that it has been deattenuating since initial escape in August 2019,” the report states.
“A year after DARPA denied this proposal to create chimeric bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a novel bat virus with a furin cleavage site began infecting humans in Wuhan. No other closely related virus has this furin cleavage site,” RealClearInvestigations reported in April.
The documents Paul released contain emails showing that Fauci was aware of concerns about the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site early during the pandemic.
In a January 2020 email thread, Fauci responded to concerns from virologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., and immunologist Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D., about the presence of the furin cleavage site.
In a Jan. 31, 2020, email, Fauci wrote, “I just got off the phone with Kristian Anderson and he related to me his concern about the Furine site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019-nCoV.”
In a later email related to these concerns, Fauci wrote, “The story gets complicated.”
DARPA: Mass vaccination actually increased risks from SARS-CoV-2 virus
The virus also contained characteristics that made it difficult to treat or prevent with mRNA vaccines, the DARPA report suggested.
“The gene-encoded, or ‘mRNA,’ vaccines work poorly because they are synthetic replications of the already-synthetic SARSr-CoV-WIV spike proteins and possess no other epitopes” — or the part of an antigen that the immune system recognizes.
The report adds:
“The mRNA instructs the cells to produce synthetic copies of the SARSr-CoV-WIV synthetic spike protein directly into the bloodstream, wherein they spread and produce the same ACE2 immune storm that the recombinant vaccine does.
“Many doctors in the country have identified that the symptoms of vaccine reactions mirror the symptoms of the disease, which corroborates with the similar synthetic nature and function of the respective spike proteins.”
The DARPA report suggested that mass vaccination campaigns actually increased the risks from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in a manner replicating that of gain-of-function research, which increases the virulence or transmissibility of viruses. It stated:
“The potential for SARSr-CoV-WIV to deattentuate requires immediate attention. Live vaccines have been found to deattentuate in the past.
“If this is the case with SARSr-CoV-WIV, then the mass vaccination campaign actually performs an accelerated gain-of-function for it. Since it is designed for bats off of a human-susceptible SARS-CoV, vaccinating humans against it actually gains its function back towards a more deattenuated human-susceptible form.”
For the same reasons, other pandemic-related interventions such as masks would be ineffective in stopping the spread of COVID-19, the report states.
“The reasons why nonpharmaceutical interventions like masks and medical countermeasures like the mRNA vaccines do not work well can be extrapolated from the details. Masks or mRNA vaccines would not work for this material,” said former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova. “It is a chemical aerosol poisoning agent. DARPA knows this well.”
Certain characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 made alternative treatment options, such as ivermectin, more effective in treating COVID-19, the report suggests.
“Many of the early treatment protocols ignored by the authorities work because they inhibit viral replication or modulate the immune response to the spike proteins.
“Some of these treatment protocols also inhibit the action of the engineered spike protein. For instance, Ivermectin (identified as curative in April 2020) works throughout all phases of illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response.
“Of note, chloroquine phosphate (Hydroxychloriquine, identified April 2020 as curative) is identified in the proposal as a SARSr-CoV inhibitor, as is interferon (identified May 2020 as curative).”
Fauci was warned about risks of gain-of-function research in 2003
The documents Paul released this week also shed light on Fauci’s intelligence ties. In 2003, Fauci received a CIA report, “The Darker Bioweapons Future,” warning that “engineered biological agents” could lead to effects potentially “worse than any disease known to man.”
While the CIA report doesn’t mention gain-of-function research by name, it cites several examples of cases where viral transmissibility or virulence were enhanced.
The documents also contain an invitation for Fauci to participate in a July 2021 National Security Council briefing related to then-President Joe Biden’s inquiry regarding COVID’s origins — for which Fauci was exempted from a COVID-19 test.
According to Erdman’s Senate testimony last month, the Biden inquiry — and Fauci’s efforts to cover up the likely laboratory origins of COVID-19 — resulted in the White House publishing an August 2021 report that was inconclusive about the virus’s origins — even though intelligence agencies by then had evidence of a lab leak.
A March 6, 2020, email from then-NIH Director Francis Collins referenced the “Proximal Origin” paper published in the journal Nature Medicine, which found that COVID-19 emerged naturally. The paper was widely used to refute the lab-leak theory. Collins suggested that he and Fauci quietly contributed to that paper.
“FYI, this is work that Tony [Fauci], Jeremy [Farrar] … and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper,” Collins wrote.
“What came afterwards was information warfare,” said Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist. “The world was convinced the virus had bat origins — yet it did not infect bats.”
“The censorship in the first two years was incredibly heavy,” Latypova said. “Everyone, including currently ‘awake’ outlets like Tucker Carlson, enthusiastically endorsed the narrative of natural origin, and anyone who questioned this as bogus (myself) was kicked off all social media platforms.”
Will Fauci come clean when he testifies?
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a critic of gain-of-function research, said Fauci has a lot to potentially answer for in his congressional interview — and that Biden’s preemptive pardon of Fauci, issued last year, won’t protect Fauci if he lies before Congress. Ebright said:
“Because Fauci’s autopen pardon covers only federal crimes that Fauci committed before Jan. 21, 2025, it does not protect Fauci from prosecution for lying to Congress in a Congressional transcribed interview or public hearing in 2026. He will not even be able to repeat previous lies with impunity in a Congressional transcribed interview or public hearing in 2026.”
Ebright said Fauci has three options — responding truthfully and “confessing that he committed conspiracy to defraud, fraud, perjury, misuse of federal funds, destruction of federal records and obstruction.” Or he can provide false testimony and risk perjury charges, or feign mental incapacitation and inability to recall.
“Erdman testified before the Senate that Fauci actively worked through the intelligence community’s COVID origin task forces to advance his own agenda and steer … COVID-19 policy,” Weidle said. “These revelations should shock no one. Yet the question remains: will anything actually be done about it?”
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.
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.
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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