As early as January 2022, National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers were aware of at least 850 peer-reviewed case reports and/or research articles about COVID-19 vaccine reactions, according to emails obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
In one email (name and agency redacted), NIH researchers were told the federal government was “saddled” with the “mess” of dealing with those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines, due to the liability shield enjoyed by vaccine manufacturers.
The emails, part of a 309-page batch of documents released to CHD on June 21, originated from a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) request to NIH researchers for input on a report highlighting several injuries common among people who received the vaccines.
CHD requested the documents via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NIH in November 2022. When the NIH hadn’t responded by April 2023, CHD sued the agency.
The batch of documents released in June — which include emails to Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research — revealed that by fall 2021, key NIH researchers were aware of scientific studies on serious adverse events, including persistent neurological symptoms, following COVID-19 vaccines.
As with prior releases of the NIH documents, June’s tranche also included several emails from vaccine-injured individuals to NIH researchers, seeking help for their symptoms — with one person asking, “Why aren’t you studying vaccine injuries?”
‘Tinnitus … was a freight train in my head for the first four months’
On Jan. 10, 2022, NIH researcher Dr. Avindra Nath was forwarded an email from someone whose name is redacted, with the subject line: “Followup [sic] Jan 4th Meeting” (pages 281-289).
The original email, dated Jan. 9, 2022, was sent to FDA officials including Marks and Dr. Janet Woodcock, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, who apparently participated in a meeting on this topic on Jan. 4, 2022.
The Jan. 9, 2022 email included a list of “persistent symptoms following the Covid vaccines” and the names of researchers who were studying these conditions, which included dysautonomia, neuropathy, tinnitus, multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), myocarditis, blood clots and parasthesias.
The email was accompanied by a spreadsheet listing approximately 850 “peer-reviewed case reports/research articles about Covid vaccine reactions.”
Regarding dysautonomia — a nervous system disorder that disrupts automatic bodily functions — the email stated that the condition is “grossly under diagnosed” and “is not diagnosed in ERs or ICUs” but in “autonomic specialty labs.”
The email noted that such labs are less likely than hospitals to file reports with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and added that there “likely are issues with identifying this syndrome if only looking through VAERS or similarly reported databases.”
As a result, the email suggested “it would be reasonable to approach autonomic specialists / long covid specialists about their observations.”
The Jan. 9, 2022, email also noted unusual trends regarding diagnoses of neuropathy — a set of neurological symptoms that includes numbness and tingling in the hands or feet, and a burning, stabbing or shooting pain in affected areas.
According to the email, “Historically, neuropathy presents in the predominantly male population aged 59+. However as discussed previous [sic], neuropathy in our case is predominantly female, aged 29-40.”
As with dysautonomia, the email noted that neuropathy is “likely to be inadequately reported through the VAERS and BEST [Biologics Effectiveness and Safety] systems because of the circumstances previously mentioned for dysautonomia.”
The Jan. 9, 2022 email also acknowledged that tinnitus was a common post-vaccination injury, noting, “Our findings are that this is not just J&J [the Johnson & Johnson, or Janssen, COVID-19 vaccine] … not by a long shot.”
According to the email, “This symptom is more proportionate to the general neuro symptoms by brand as previously reported in our patient led survey of 500 participants.”
The email’s author also noted that, “in my case yes, I have tinnitus now and it was a freight train in my head for the first four months.”
‘Is it reasonable to dismiss … 20 new symptoms … in a single person post vaccine?’
According to the email, myocarditis and blood clots were already “acknowledged by the FDA and CDC” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
“Every person in our groups that have one of these two conditions, also have accompanying neuro issues like those of us who are not currently acknowledged by the FDA and CDC,” the email said.
“Even the perfectly healthy very fit young males with the lasting myocarditis are struggling with the POTS and inflammation/brain fog/memory loss. Makes me suspect that somehow these all are a result of the same mechanism of action,” the email stated.
The Jan. 9, 2022, email also acknowledged parasthesia — a condition that causes a burning, prickling sensation — and MIS, a condition in which numerous organs become inflamed, as concerns.
The email openly questioned why more wasn’t being done to connect these conditions in the vaccinated, to the COVID-19 vaccines themselves, noting that vaccinated people were frequently demonstrating multiple rare symptoms:
“While we understand that correlation does not equal causation, we also find a strong correlation with the change in our blood that mirrors long-haul, and symptomology that mirrors long-haul.
“Because of this, I have to ask what is the process by which Covid PASC [post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or long COVID] symptoms have been so readily tied back to Covid, whereas the same symptoms due to the Covid vaccines have not?
“Also, while it may be coincidental to have one or maybe two strange symptoms pop up, is it reasonable to dismiss 10, 15, 20 new symptoms that occur in a single person post vaccine.”
‘Insanely challenging for these people suffering … to walk this path alone’
In the Jan. 10, 2022, email to Nath an NIH researcher wrote, “The FDA has asked once again for us to provide any input from those who have experience with this disease. Very prompt responses and more active engagement on their part lead me to believe they will now examine these problems with some effort.”
The author also asked Nath if he knew researchers “who could fill in the gaps” and asked him if he would “kindly be willing to discuss with Peter Marks?”
“The gov has conveniently absolved the drug companies of any liability, and the federal government is now saddled with the responsibility of figuring out this mess,” the email continued. “I am happy to orchestrate a meeting of the minds with NDR [non-disclosure] agreements if that would get the discussion started in a way that is similar to how previous new diseases have been investigated.”
The email also noted talks with public health officials in Germany and France.
“It has been insanely challenging for these people suffering to have to walk this path alone. They grow more and more desperate by the day. Knowing there is someone, somewhere looking into this makes a big difference for these people to just hang on.”
Even though public health agencies were aware of this information and were discussing vaccine injuries in early 2022, official government advice to the public continued to claim the COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective,” including statements by Dr. Anthony Fauci in November 2022.
And in testimony before Congress in February, Marks dismissed the COVID-19 vaccine injury reports filed with VAERS, stating that numerous false reports are submitted to the database — a claim some experts have disputed.
As of today, the CDC continues to recommend the COVID-19 vaccines “for everyone ages 6 months and older, including people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or might become pregnant in the future.”
NIH researchers aware of vaccine injury studies in fall of 2021
The June 2024 tranche of NIH documents also revealed that, at least as early as fall 2021, researchers with the agency were aware of scientific studies and surveys highlighting serious adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination.
The version of the survey included in the email was accurate as of Aug. 31, 2021, and contained the results of 382 questionnaires submitted by people “suffering persistent neurological symptoms after receiving the Sars-CoV2 Vaccine in the United States.”
According to those results, 71% of respondents said they had no preexisting health conditions prior to the symptoms they developed following their COVID-19 vaccination, and 94% said they had never previously experienced a reaction to other vaccines.
The most commonly reported symptoms included paresthesia, tinnitus, heart palpitations, tachycardia, chest pain, visual disturbance or loss, muscle twitching, joint pain, muscle aches, brain fog, fatigue and anxiety attacks.
Almost all respondents said these symptoms began less than two weeks following vaccination.
In a Nov. 15, 2021, email (pages 300-305), Nath was sent a scientific paper, “Neurological side effects of SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations,” authored by Austrian researcher Josef Finsterer, M.D., Ph.D.
“Safety concerns against SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are backed by an increasing number of studies reporting neurological side effects. … Healthcare professionals, particularly neurologists involved in the management of patients having undergone SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations, should be aware of these side effects and should stay vigilant to recognize them early and treat them adequately,” the paper concluded.
According to the preprint, “Myelitis has been reported as a complication of COVID-19 infection. However, it has rarely been reported as a complication of COVID-19 vaccination.”
The paper focused on the example of one of Fitzsimmons’ patients, a 63-year-old previously healthy male who developed myelitis after his second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine — and treatment that was effective in his case.
Other emails apparently sent by Fitzsimmons highlighted the injuries and the progression of treatment of this 63-year-old man (pages 145-150).
‘A blood clot as a cause of your paralysis would make the most sense’
In an email chain to Nath beginning Sept. 20, 2021, (pages 228-233) with the subject “Paralyzed after J&J Covid Vaccine,” the author (whose name is redacted) said that less than 24 hours following vaccination, the patient “lost bladder control.” He later developed a blood clot and erectile dysfunction, before becoming paralyzed.
In a response that day, Nath told the patient, “The temporal association of the symptoms with the vaccine does make is [sic] suspect, but I do not know of any way how to sort it out.”
In a follow-up email that day, Nath said, “A blood clot as a cause of your paralysis would make the most sense, however, proving cause and effect related to the vaccine in a single patient is virtually impossible.”
In a Dec. 13, 2021, email to Nath (pages 234-236), another vaccine injury victim, who “was healthy prior to vaccination,” described injuries following both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, including paresthesia, tachycardia, severe tinnitus, intractable insomnia and “POTs-like symptoms.”
“I have been diligent and determined in seeking care near and far, but have continued to face skepticism, half-interest, and an inability to know how best to treat,” this person wrote.
And in a series of emails beginning Jan. 24, 2022, (pages 246-247), a “woman who was completely healthy before taking the Pfizer vaccines” told Nath about a series of neurological symptoms and inflammation she experienced following her second dose, in addition to symptoms like tinnitus, insomnia and brain fog.
“Why isn’t the NIH doing research on this?” she asked in a follow-up email on Jan. 25, 2022.
A longtime aide to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci allegedly boasted in emails about his ability to evade public records requests and his intention to delete any potential “smoking guns,” a congressional hearing revealed Thursday.
Former National Institutes of Health Acting Director Lawrence Tabak testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which has been investigating an American research organization at the center of suspicions that the COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted from a lab accident in Wuhan.
The hearing follows an announcement Wednesday that this organization — EcoHealth Alliance, helmed by President Peter Daszak — has had its federal funding suspended and could be on track to be debarred from federal funding for years. The enforcement action stems from EcoHealth’s failure to adequately oversee the research it subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This research included experiments that made SARS-related coronaviruses more dangerous. Daszak testified before the committee earlier this month.
EcoHealth’s research was underwritten by NIAID — placing Fauci and his aides in the spotlight too. The scrutiny of EcoHealth and NIAID has revealed that Daszak had a close connection to Fauci’s inner circle in the senior advisor to the NIAID director, David Morens.
Morens told the committee in a transcribed interview that Daszak is one of his oldest friends.
Now evidence has surfaced suggesting that Morens evaded the Freedom of Information Act — which requires that records from federal agencies be made public with limited exceptions — and that an unidentified public records official with the NIH helped him to do so.
NIH and NIAID did not immediately reply to request for comment.
Morens boasted about the ability to “make emails disappear” even after a FOIA request had been submitted, according to the committee.
The emails were revealed in questions by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky.
“Dr. David Morens, a senior advisor to Fauci for decades, wrote in an email to Dr. Daszak, ‘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. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail,’” Comer said Thursday. “Is that consistent with NIH document retention policies?”
“It is not,” Tabak answered.
Asked if the NIH FOIA office instructs employees on how to evade FOIA, Tabak answered, “I certainly hope not.”
U.S. Right to Know is among the organizations that have submitted FOIAs to the NIH for emails from Morens about information with potential relevance to the origins of COVID-19 and is litigating against the NIH over its failure to comply with a January 2022 FOIA request for Morens’s records.
In a separate email, Morens said that he intended to delete any records or emails that might constitute a “smoking gun.”
“He also later wrote Dr. Daszak, ‘We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns. And if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails. And if we found them we would delete them,’” Comer said. “Is that consistent with NIH document retention policies?”
“It is not,” Tabak again replied.
According to Comer, Daszak and Morens also collaborated in crafting public messages in response to emails set to be released by NIH under FOIA.
The emails described by Comer undermine Tabak’s prepared testimony at the hearing in which he claimed the NIH is committed to transparency and following the science on the question of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tabak’s testimony sets the stage for Morens to testify next week. Morens supplied the committee with 30,000 emails the day before Daszak testified before the committee on May 1.
Morens wrote in an email to Daszak in 2021 that he communicates on Gmail “because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” The Intercept previouslyreported.
“Just send to any of my addresses and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times,” Morens wrote.
Looped into this email chain were several virologists who have cast the lab origin hypothesis as a conspiracy theory in the press. These virologists included University of Sydney virologist Edward Holmes, Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, and Tulane University virologist Robert Garry, who have also been investigated by the committee for their role in an influential paper that dismissed the idea SARS-CoV-2 could have been engineered without disclosing the involvement of Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins.
The committee released emails earlier this month showing that Daszak informed Morens of his intention to voluntarily release only enough records to stave off a subpoena for more. The committee is now demanding more documents from Daszak, according to Subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio.
The committee’s investigation is building up to the testimony of Fauci on June 3.
Tabak confirmed Thursday that the NIAID did indeed fund gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan through EcoHealth Alliance according to the colloquial understanding.
According to the policy in place from 2014 to 2018 — the “U.S. Government Gain-of-Function Deliberative Process and Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses” — the definition of gain-of-function research at the time of the experiments involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology included “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”
Grant reports demonstrate that “chimeric” or combined coronaviruses studied by EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology caused more severe disease in mice engineered to express human receptors than the backbone virus.
However, Tabak downplayed the risk posed by these chimeric viruses because they were bat coronaviruses, though the public literature described one of these viruses as “poised for human emergence.”
Fauci repeatedly denied that NIAID funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan in high-profile exchanges with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in 2021.
“Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially,” Fauci said in a July 2021 hearing.
Tabak confirmed in the hearing Wednesday that in October 2021 the NIH communications office changed the definition of “gain-of-function research” on the NIH website.
Asked to identify which scientist at NIH made or vetted the decision, Tabak could not identify any particular official.
Exactly one year ago, the investigative journalist and author, Alison Young, published a report in USA Today on an accident that occurred on December 9, 2019 at the University of Wisconsin’s Influenza Research Institute.
The accident involved experiments with an H5N1 influenza virus that had been modified through GoF to make it transmissible among ferrets. The research team leader—a renowned virologist named Yoshihiro Kawaoka—had gained international attention (or notoriety) for his controversial GoF research on H5N1. As Alison Young reported:
… in late 2011 the world learned that two scientific teams – one in Wisconsin, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, and another in the Netherlands, led by virologist Ron Fouchier – had potentially pushed the virus in that direction. Each of these labs had created H5N1 viruses that had gained the ability to spread through the air between ferrets, the animal model used to study how flu viruses might behave in humans.
The ultimate goal of this work was to help protect the world from future pandemics, and the research was supported with words and funding by two of the most prominent scientists in the United States: Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Kawaoka contended it would be “irresponsible not to study” how the virus might evolve in nature. “Some people have argued that the risks of such studies – misuse and accidental release, for example – outweigh the benefits. I counter that H5N1 viruses circulating in nature already pose a threat,” he said at the time.
In Nov. 2013, a needlestick accident happened on Kawaoka’s research team, followed by failure to adhere to the established quarantine rules. Though no human infection resulted from this accident, it was nevertheless alarming. Young’s report continues:
By 2014, there was a growing discomfort at the highest levels of the U.S. government about the risk of an accident with an engineered virus.
Wisconsin’s needlestick incident, which drew questions within NIH but wasn’t publicly known, was soon followed by a series of high-profile accidents at federal labs in 2014 – from safety breaches with anthrax and avian influenza at the CDC to the discovery of forgotten vials of smallpox that had been kept for decades in a storage room on the NIH campus.
The funding pause remained in place for three years until it was finally lifted in December 2017. But it was only in 2019 that some of the halted experiments were quietly allowed to begin again under a revised federal oversight process, which was criticized for keeping secret the details of the new experiments and the basis for the government approvals.
The second accident on Kawaoka’s team occurred less than a year after GoF experiments were allowed to resume. This time, a lab researcher in training was working with ferrets infected with the GoF-modified H5N1 when his respirator hose was discovered to have detached from his hood, allowing him to breathe the possibly contaminated air in the cabinet. Again the quarantine rules were not properly followed, and nor was the incident promptly reported to the NIH.
Though the accident purportedly did not result in a human infection, it nevertheless raises many questions about the prudence of manipulating the H5N1 virus in a lab in order to make it infectious and transmissible among mammals.
Alison Young’s report prompted me to start reading her book, Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, published on April 25, 2023. Young has a long history of researching and reporting on Bio-labs and their checkered past. Most lab manipulation of pathogens is purportedly done to develop vaccines against them in the event that their natural iterations should ever evolve to infect humans, but this rationale is highly questionable if not downright mendacious.
Indeed, on December 18, 2013, the Foundation for Vaccine Research wrote a letter to the European Commission, signed by 56 scientists (including Nobel Laureates) in which they sharply criticized the GoF experiments on H5N1 by virologist, Ron Fouchier.
The 56 scientists vehemently express their opinion that naturally-occurring H5N1 does NOT efficiently transmit to humans and therefore poses little risk to humans.
Far more dangerous, they claim, is the possibility of a lab-modified H5N1 virus escaping from a lab. The scientists refer to the resurgence of H1N1 influenza in 1977 after a 20-year hiatus, most likely after escaping from a lab in the former Soviet Union.
The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) awarded over $685,000 to HealthPartners Institute to test strategies for getting dentists to recommend the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to children and young adults ages 11-26, documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed.
The NIDCR operates under the government’s taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The HealthPartners study is being conducted three years after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added prevention of oropharyngeal cancer, a form of head and neck cancer, to a growing list of indications for the HPV vaccine — despite a lack of clinical evidence to support the claim.
The NIDCR funding covers the first two years of a six-year, $3.5 million proposal for the healthcare nonprofit to experiment with training dental providers to deliver scripted messages to their patients about why they should get the HPV vaccine.
HealthPartners will then run a clinical trial in 21 dental clinics to determine whether the training and messages lead more dental providers to recommend the vaccine, and more patients to take it.
The grant is one of nearly 50 identified by CHD in June — totaling more than $40 million — awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to universities, healthcare systems and public health departments to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents.
The NIDCR is the latest of several HHS sub-agencies to fund behavior modification research aimed at providers and patients in order to increase vaccine uptake.
Why would dentists be charged with recommending the HPV vaccine?
Dentists are uniquely positioned to promote the HPV vaccine because they tend to have more regular contact with young patients than other healthcare providers, the HealthPartners proposal states.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Dental Association and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry all recommend that dental providers promote HPV vaccination — but most dental providers don’t see vaccine promotion as part of dentistry.
HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. Most people will get the infection at some point in their lives, but more than 90% of infections clear on their own with no residual health consequences on clinical follow-up.
High-risk HPV types can cause cervical cell abnormalities that are precursors to cancer, however, HPV infection is not the sole risk factor for cervical cancer.
Regular pap screening has been found to reduce the incidence of and mortality from cervical cancer among women by at least 80%.
Merck’s Gardasil 9 — the only HPV vaccine marketed in the U.S. — is a widely used vaccine commonly administered to teens and young adults before they are sexually active to protect against nine of more than 200 strands of HPV that can be sexually transmitted later in life.
Despite Merck marketing Gardasil as a vaccine that protects against some forms of cancer, clinical trials for Gardasil did not test whether the vaccine protected against any cancer — only whether it had efficacy against the indicated strains of HPV.
Gardasil has been associated with a number of serious adverse events.
More than 80 lawsuits against Merck now pending in federal courts allege the drugmaker fast-tracked Gardasil through the FDA’s approval process and deceptively conducted clinical trials to mask serious side effects and exaggerate the vaccine’s effectiveness.
In June 2020, the FDA added the prevention of oropharyngeal and other head and neck cancers to the list of indications for the HPV vaccine under the “accelerated approval licensure pathway.”
That pathway allows treatments to be approved before clinical data demonstrating benefit exists, based on early clinical predictions that the treatment will likely produce a benefit.
Later, if a clinical benefit is never found, the FDA “can seek withdrawal” of the drug from the market.
According to the HealthPartners grant proposal, HPV is the leading cause of oropharyngeal cancers in the U.S., However, the references cited to support that claim are from 2014 — and they don’t appear to support the claim.
The CDC estimates 70% of oropharyngeal cancers in the U.S. are “thought to be” caused by HPV, and qualifies even that claim by adding, “It is unclear if having HPV alone is enough to cause oropharyngeal cancers.”
There is no evidence that the HPV vaccine prevents oropharyngeal cancers, but some trials have found that it does have efficacy against vaccine-type oral strains of HPV.
On that basis, the HealthPartners study aims to change dental providers’ behavior so they consistently recommend the HPV vaccine to their patients. Dr. Brad Rindal, a dentist, and Patricia Mabry, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, are co-leading the study.
The proposal falls within HHS’ mission to understand the mechanisms of behavior change in order to develop methods of “experimental manipulation or intervention” with providers and patients that can help it meet its targets in various aspects of public health.
HHS, through the NIH, has been funding behavioral studies to assess and influence providers’ willingness to recommend and administer the HPV vaccine in order to increase rates of vaccine uptake since shortly after the vaccine was first licensed in 2006.
Study design explicitly waives informed consent for patients
In the study, a team of researchers from HealthPartners — which provides healthcare, coverage, research and education to 1.8 million plan members — will train providers, teaching them about the relationship between the HPV vaccine and the risk of oropharyngeal cancer.
Trained providers also will receive scripts for use in patient conversations tailored to “reduce fear” that such conversations will negatively impact provider-patient relationships. They also will learn how to refer their patients to a vaccine scheduler.
Researchers will then measure changes in provider behavior through direct provider reporting — they press a button in their office when they make a recommendation — and follow-up surveys.
Patients or patient parents or guardians will receive follow-up survey calls after the office visits to assess how effective the provider communication was.
Researchers will measure changes in patient behavior by assessing how many patients receive initial and follow-up doses of the HPV vaccine within 30 days of their office visit.
In the first two years of the study — funded by the initial grant — the team will develop and pilot test their training and scripts. Their control group will receive patient education brochures and untailored scripts and their intervention group will receive the training and the tailored scripts.
In the next phase, they will test the efficacy of these interventions in clinic-randomized trials, comparing the control and intervention groups. Twenty-one HealthPartners Dental Group clinics and their providers will participate.
Patients 11-26 years old who go to HealthPartners dental clinics and whose electronic health records indicate they have not initiated or completed the HPV vaccine series will be automatically enrolled in the study without their knowledge. HealthPartners estimates there will be approximately 8,000 qualifying visits with HPV unvaccinated patients.
Verbal informed consent will be obtained for participation in the post-intervention patient/parent phone survey.
The patients will not otherwise be informed of the study.
The study requests a waiver of informed consent for patients by arguing that the dental providers will only be making recommendations already endorsed by the CDC, the American Cancer Society and the National HPV Roundtable, which is a joint venture of the CDC and the American Cancer Society.
“Therefore,” they state, “the recommendations conform to current standards of care and don’t present a risk to patients that exceed the risks that patients assume when they seek care within any healthcare system focused on disease prevention through vaccination promotion.”
They also argue that the research “would not be feasible without such a waiver” because it would bias the provider involvement and patient response.
They add that patients sign a HIPAA authorization form that allows them to opt out of using health data for research purposes and that they will be certain to check that list.
Finally, they note that “patients can elect not to pursue vaccination despite the recommendation of the dental care provider” — even though the intervention is designed to change their behavior so they don’t make such an election.
Merck, federal public health agencies, and WHO looking to grow market for HPV shots
Merck’s Gardasil was first licensed in 2006 for use in girls and women ages 9-26 to prevent four high-risk strains of HPV.
The FDA in 2009 expanded the license for use in males ages 9-26 for the prevention of genital warts and in 2011, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended it for routine use in boys.
In 2014, the FDA approved Gardasil 9, designed to protect against 9 HPV strains, for use in the prevention of HPV-related cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females and HPV-related anogenital lesions and anal cancers in males and females.
The FDA also expanded the age range of potential HPV vaccines to males and females between the ages of 9 and 45.
Early marketing strategies focused on promoting the drug as guarding against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease. But in 2016, as vaccination rates lagged, the CDC recommended that doctors stress the HPV vaccine’s cancer-prevention benefits, rather than talking about STDs as a way to get more parents to vaccinate younger kids.
And in 2020, it added oropharyngeal and other head and neck cancers to the list.
Over the last several years, HHS has invested tens of millions of dollars in research to get U.S. HPV vaccine uptake numbers to HHS’ “healthy people” target rates of 80% of children and teens vaccinated by 2030.
Meanwhile, Merck has expanded its ad campaigns beyond teenagers to target parents of young children and adults.
Last week Merck announced its third-quarter earnings from Gardasil were up 13% to $2.9 billion. Allied Market Research predicts the global HPV vaccine market — in which Merck is the primary player, although GSK also markets its Cervarix outside of the U.S. — will grow to $10.8 billion.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday passed an amendment that would prohibit funding for transgenic edible vaccines — vaccines grown in genetically engineered plants for consumption by humans or animals.
The amendment, introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to the agricultural appropriations bill H.R. 4368, would bar the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from funding the vaccines for fiscal year 2024.
A vote on the full bill in the House is still pending as of this writing.
In an interview with The Defender, Massie said he introduced the amendment after learning about a recent project in California, funded by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, that involves growing lettuce and trying to get the lettuce to produce mRNA vaccines that are intended to be consumed by humans who eat the lettuces.
Massie said he is concerned “that plants cross-pollinate and pollen from these modified plants, food-producing plants, could carry in the wind to other fields and contaminate them. And we could really contaminate a lot of our food supply with unknown doses of vaccines that would deliver unknown dosages.”
“Plants release pollen and it can go anywhere with the wind or with insects, and I just think it’s a bad idea,” he added.
Update on Food Freedom legislation from last night:
✅Protecting HerdShares: passed by voice
✅Prohibiting funds for transgenic edible plant vaccines: passed by voice
⁉️Stopping the electronic cattle tag mandate: vote today!
“Rep. Massie is right to be concerned,” Claire Robinson, managing editor of GMWatch, told The Defender. “Genetically engineering a potent immunogen into food plants is irresponsible in the extreme.” She added:
“All the usual risks of GM [genetically modified] plants — the DNA-damaging effects of the GM transformation process leads to changes in gene expression and biochemistry of the plant, which can include the production of toxins or allergens — apply to these vaccine-producing plants, with additional risks on top.
“In the case of vaccine-producing plants, you are intentionally engineering a plant to elicit an immune reaction. This increases the level of risk exponentially.”
‘Either they don’t work, or they are not safe, or both’
According to a 2013 scientific paper, transgenic edible vaccines “are prepared by introducing selected desired genes into plants and inducing these genetically modified plants to manufacture the encoded proteins.”
Such vaccines offer “several potential advantages” to conventional vaccine production techniques according to the paper, including a potentially lower cost of production that would be suitable for developing countries.
Efforts to develop transgenic edible vaccines are not new — scientific literature on the topic dates back to at least 1999.
What is new with some current attempts to develop transgenic edible vaccines is that they would be geared to deliver mRNA vaccines orally.
“These are all genetically modified crops,” Massie said. “They’ve been injected with mRNA or spliced with DNA, with the intent of creating copies of that RNA or DNA. The plants are pretty effective at that.”
Robinson said this approach is not new. “Scientists have been trying to produce edible vaccines in plants for many years and some testing has occurred in animals and humans.”
However, she added, “Thus far, not one plant-produced vaccine has been approved anywhere, as far as I know. What does that tell us? Either they don’t work, or they are not safe, or both,” Robinson said.
California project is ‘utter madness’
The California lettuce project that drew Massie’s attention, conducted by scientists at University of California (UC), Riverside, is described as an effort to develop “The future of vaccines,” which “may look more like eating a salad than getting a shot in the arm” via turning “edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories.”
“The project’s goals … are threefold,” according to UC Riverside. “Showing that DNA containing the mRNA vaccines can be successfully delivered into the part of plant cells where it will replicate, demonstrating the plants can produce enough mRNA to rival a traditional shot, and finally, determining the right dosage.”
This may help overcome challenges currently facing mRNA vaccine technology, namely, “that it must be kept cold to maintain stability during transport and storage.”
Plant-based mRNA vaccines “could overcome this challenge with the ability to be stored at room temperature,” university researchers said.
Juan Pablo Giraldo, Ph.D., an associate professor at UC Riverside’s Botany and Plant Sciences Department, is leading this research project alongside scientists from UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. He said, “Ideally, a single plant would produce enough mRNA to vaccinate a single person.”
“We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens,” he added. “Farmers could also eventually grow entire fields of it.”
Robinson called such efforts “utter madness,” telling The Defender :
“Scientists are talking about people growing vaccine-containing plants in their gardens and farmers growing them in their fields. It is utter madness to propose to release such plants into uncontrolled conditions in this way.
“Vaccines are medicines, and their use and dosage must be carefully controlled. With any medicine, only the target patient should be treated, with their informed consent. How will these safeguards be in place if people are growing vaccines in food crops in their gardens and open fields?”
“The deployment of these transgenic edible vaccines would involve a gross violation of the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation, and thus constitute a crime against humanity,” he said. “Their release into the environment would violate the Precautionary Principle of customary international environmental law. They would also be subject to the same human health objections to GMO foods that are too numerous for me to list.”
“What about cross-pollination and cross-contamination?” Robinson questioned. “People will ingest immunogens without their consent or knowledge.”
Risk of prion diseases, ‘dangerous immune reactions’
Robinson said there may also be several other unintended consequences for human health from the use of transgenic edible vaccines.
She said:
“Plant-produced vaccines will have what is known as post-translational modifications to the intended protein product. You will not end up with just the desired protein product as it exists in its native form in the pathogen. These post-translational modifications will be specific to the plant, and in humans or other animals they will produce dangerous immune reactions.
“Even the responses to the desired protein product — the ‘vaccine’ — will vary from person to person because people respond differently to different proteins. Also, you can end up with proteins that are toxic or that are not folded properly, with the latter property meaning that they could cause prion diseases.”
“In addition, it’s possible that the novel proteins will sensitize people to other things, such as foods,” Robinson said. “In an age where food allergies are increasing rapidly, do we really want to risk worsening that trend?”
Massie said there are other ways in which the human food supply could be contaminated by plant-based vaccines, noting that animals could eat plants and “that could eventually contaminate food that humans eat.”
“How do you control the dosage when you put it in food?” Massie asked. “I think it’s just a really bad idea. Even if you’re not against vaccines in general, I just think this is a really bad way to deliver vaccines to people or animals,” he said.
He added:
“I think we should have learned our lesson. If we believe that COVID-19 was a lab escape and the result of human experiments, which I do and most Americans do, then I think you should be concerned about these outdoor labs … Here we’re talking about greenhouses or open fields.”
Along similar lines, Boyle said, “We know that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines have produced a massive number of deaths and adverse events that have been thoroughly documented in the professional literature.”
“These transgenic edible vaccines would likewise be more dangerous than useless, so I wholeheartedly support Massie’s amendment,” he added.
In drawing another parallel with COVID-19, Massie likened the UC Riverside study to “science fiction.”
“Unlike some of the other research that’s been done for vaccines for animals to be grown in plants, this project in California is intended to develop vaccines for humans … I have no idea what they’re doing with this stuff. It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie,” he said.
He added:
“I think we learned from the COVID virus that you’ve got to be careful with this stuff. When you start playing God and you start modifying genes and merging DNA that’s never been merged before, you can get some unintended results. And if those escape, you can have some really bad implications or consequences.”
Similar experiments went awry
According to Massie, similar experiments with transgenic edible vaccines were conducted in the past, sometimes with government funding and support — including a project to develop transgenic alfalfa plants for edible vaccine production.
That five-year project, launched in 2016 by Fort Valley State University in Georgia, sought to “develop transgenic alfalfa plants expressing the CTB gene, which can be used in plant-based edible vaccination systems.”
The project was supported by an unspecified level of funding from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and resulted in the publication of at least one scientific paper.
“And then there’s another instance where things went very bad,” Massie said. “About 20 years ago, they were trying to grow a vaccine to prevent diarrhea in pigs and they were using corn to grow this vaccine. The field the next year was used to grow soybeans, but the corn sprouted again.”
According to Massie, “There were some leftover kernels … and the corn was mixed with the soybeans, and it contaminated 500 bushels of soybeans that were then mixed with 500,000 bushels. And so, they had to destroy all of those soybeans.”
The New York Timesreported in December 2002 that ProdiGene, the biotechnology company that developed the corn crop, agreed to pay the U.S. government a $3 million fine “to settle charges that it did not take proper steps to prevent corn that was genetically engineered to produce pharmaceuticals from entering the food supply.”
While it is unclear whether this particular project was granted U.S. government funding, an archived version of the website from 2007 of Texas A&M University’s Food Protein R&D Center, which hosted the research, said the center “collaborate[d] contractually with … state and federal research laboratories” and was “partially funded by the Texas Food and Fibers Commission.”
In November 2000, ProdiGene received an unspecified grant amount from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a transgenic edible vaccine intended to “develop genetically enhanced corn that could serve as an oral delivery system for an AIDS vaccine.”
Massie told The Defender he’s not passing a law that would prevent private organizations from doing this research, “but I’m using the appropriations process this week to try to defund the use of taxpayer dollars to develop these things.”
He said the amendment is in the form of a limitation agreement. “It doesn’t institute a law,” he said. “It will only prohibit government funding from being spent on this. So even if it’s successful, it will only last for the term of the appropriations bill, which is one year.”
“If we’re successful in stopping this through the appropriations process, we would have to do this every year,” Massie said, adding that “this amendment … only constrain[s] the FDA and USDA from doing this research. It wouldn’t actually constrain the NSF.”
For that to happen, Massie said “We’ll have to have another amendment on a different appropriations bill to keep that agency from funding this research.”
Massie pledged to introduce similar amendments if this happens.
“If that appropriations bill comes to the floor, I will offer an amendment to limit the funding for this type of research on it as well,” he said. “If the appropriations bill that funds the NSF should make it to the floor, I’ll offer this identical amendment to keep them from funding it.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
In the new era of biosecurity totalitarianism when authorities actively seek to silence even the most qualified dissenting voices, perhaps nothing could be more corrosive to public confidence than finding that a leading research institute participated in a deliberate fraud. The scientific misconduct in question is the intentional selection of an inappropriate animal model for a pre-clinical study and its subsequent concealment. Intentional scientific misconduct for financial gain is fraud.The organisation in question is the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical and behavioural research in the world, which describes itself as ‘the driving force behind decades of advances that improve health, revolutionize science, and serve society more broadly’. In this case, the interests served were the NIH’s own finances and those of a private company, Moderna.
The NIH was implicated by Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, in an April 1, 2020 webcast hosted by MIT Sloan Business School Finance Professor Andrew Lo and co-hosted by the Laboratory for Financial Engineering. Bancel’s presentation, ‘Accelerating mRNA medicines to patients’, was about the company’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 developed jointly over the course of a pre-Davos January 2020 weekend with the NIH’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), led by Dr Anthony Fauci. Investor interest in the company and its vaccine was high. Moderna was leading the race for a Covid-19 vaccine with the NIH not long having announced that it had dosed the first human volunteer with mRNA-1273 in a Phase 1 clinical trial expected to run for six weeks.
An excited Bancel said, ‘What I want to share with you is just one set of data, but I think it is important. It is data that we published in our S-3 in February. This is the pre-clinical data on a related coronavirus MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, that many of you will recall happened in the Middle East, in Saudi, a few years ago and a few years later again in South Korea. So what you see here is a rabbit model.’
Bancel showed his audience graphs of data from a pre-clinical study conducted on rabbits and concluded: ‘We are very excited to see this data that was realised with the NIH, with the team of Dr Tony Fauci.’
One of the graphs showed antibody levels over time in a placebo group injected with saline and in single and double dose vaccine groups. But the antibody levels induced by the vaccine doses should have been compared with the levels of antibodies produced by exposure to the MERS virus itself, as a vaccine response must be shown to be superior to antibody levels induced by natural infection to be beneficial. Alongside was a second graph showing viral loads in the nose, throat and lungs following a challenge test in which the animals were exposed to ‘much higher doses of virus’ than during a natural infection. A caption on the slide claimed ‘We observed an induction of neutralising antibodies (my italics) that reduced viral load in the nose, throat and lungs of vaccinated animals’.
The rabbit study was not intended to fool drug regulators, who require an explanation of the relevance of the chosen animal model to the human disease the vaccine is meant to be protecting against. Customarily, before drug regulators permit clinical trials to begin with human volunteers, the efficacy of the candidate vaccine in preventing symptomatic clinical disease and/or pathologies associated with the disease must be demonstrated in a suitable animal model. The induction of antibodies is evidence of immunogenicity but in and of itself is not evidence of efficacy. Antibodies can be either neutralising or non-neutralising, the latter meaning that they fail to prevent reinfection following exposure to the targeted virus.
The choice of animal model for pre-clinical trials is an important one and consequently animal models must be validated. The scientific evidence that rabbits are an unsuitable model for testing the efficacy of a MERS vaccine had been in the public domain for years. In July 2019, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) hosted a workshop and subsequently commissioned IAVI (International Aids Vaccine Initiative) to prepare a report, ‘MERS-CoV standards, assays and animal models vaccine development landscape analysis’, which was funded by the NIAID, NIH, and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). So far as rabbits are concerned it concluded: ‘Despite the fact that rabbits shed MERS-CoV from their URT [upper respiratory tract], it appears that the New Zealand white rabbit model is neither suitable to study MERS-CoV transmission, nor is the model appropriate for studying clinical disease progression, given that rabbits remained asymptomatic after MERS-CoV inoculation.’
The CEPI report states: ‘Since concerns over SARS-related pathology led to a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clinical hold on vaccine studies, investigation of MERS-CoV vaccine candidates to induce virus-enhancing antibodies and harmful immune response in animal models could be informative before human clinical trials are initiated.’
The FDA ‘hold’ followed the October 2014 gain of function research moratorium on SARs, MERS and influenza ordered by the US government. However some research on MERS continued. As some people were believed to have asymptomatic MERS infections and rabbits were known to be asymptomatic when infected with it, researchers from the NIAID studied the phenomenon in rabbits. The NIH declared the experiments ‘were determined by the NIH to be urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security and as such, were exempted from the US Government Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses.’
The results of this asymptomatic study were published in 2017. The findings were not positive: ‘The rabbits developed antibodies against viral proteins that lacked neutralizing activity and the animals were not protected from reinfection (my emphasis).’ Further, the study found that even without an increase in viral RNA titers, reinfection resulted in increased inflammation of the lungs. The researchers warned: ‘Our data from the rabbit model suggests that people exposed to MERS-CoV who fail to develop a neutralizing antibody response, or persons whose neutralizing antibody titers have waned, may be at risk for severe lung disease on re-exposure to MERS-CoV.’
Bancel told the webinar audience that mRNA mimics natural infection without introducing the actual virus. But if exposure to the virus itself does not produce antibodies that protect against reinfection, there is no mechanism by which artificially stimulated antibodies can, thus rendering the company’s specific claim that the MERS vaccine induced ‘neutralizing antibodies’ untrue. The company repeated the claim in the S-3 referred to by Bancel, which was a $500 million supplementary stock offer made in February 2020, where investors were told: ‘We have demonstrated the ability to induce neutralizing antibodies that confer protection against viral challenge with a related coronavirus, MERS.’
Bancel said that Fauci’s team at NIAID helped Moderna realise the data, raising the question of why NIAID would accept the use of a model their own researchers who conducted the 2017 study knew to be unsuitable?
The week before the Phase 1 human clinical trial started in March 2020, STAT News reported on Moderna’s pre-clinical animal studies. None of the interviewees mentioned the MERS rabbit study that Moderna presented to investors and the US Patent Office the previous month. STAT News reported that they had been told by NIAID by email that ‘Virologists at NIAID tried the new vaccine [mRNA-1273] on run-of-the-mill lab mice, on the same day that the [phase 1] trial began enrolling participants’. They quoted Dr Barney Graham, the now retired Director of the NIAID Vaccine Research Centre, as saying that those mice showed the same sort of immune response generated by a similar mRNA vaccine against MERS, another coronavirus. ‘That level of immune response was sufficient to protect mice from MERS CoV infection,’ he wrote. Graham also said that mice susceptible to SARS-CoV2 ‘are being bred so that the colony can be enlarged’ adding that they ‘will be available for experiments within the next few weeks’.
Humanised mice are a validated study model for MERS, whereas rabbits are not, so if data from a mouse study of the mRNA-MERS vaccine was available, as Graham claimed, why wasn’t it used in Moderna’s February prospectus and the patent application?
Under the Research Collaboration Agreement between Moderna and NIAID, which has an effective date of July 19, 2019, NIAID was to conduct immunogenicity studies on Moderna’s mRNA-MERS vaccine in animals. During 2020, Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, the NIAID researcher assigned to run these studies for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine mRNA-1273, wrote two papers: a June 11, 2020 preprint article entitled ‘SARS-CoV2 mRNA vaccine development enabled by prototype pathogen approach’ and a second peer reviewed paper published in the journal Nature on August 5, 2020 entitled ‘SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Development Enabled by Prototype Pathogen Preparedness’. In addition to mice studies on mRNA-1273, both papers cite the mRNA-MERS mouse study that Graham told STAT News about. Neither mentions an mRNA-MERS rabbit study. Oddly, neither is the mRNA-MERS vaccine’s alpha-numeric identifier given.
Heavily redacted copies of Moderna’s contracts with NIAID were released following a freedom of information application by AXIOS News. On December 17, 2019, Moderna signed a material transfer agreement (MTA) transferring ‘mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna’ to Dr Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), directing him to perform animal challenge studies. The research programme is redacted. More suspiciously, so is the animal model stipulated in paragraph 3. Dr Baric did not respond when he was asked by me if he was commissioned to run the mRNA-MERS rabbit study.
Dr Baric is widely regarded as the world’s leading coronavirus researcher. He was a member of the World Health Organization working group on animal models to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics. So too was Dr Graham who signed the MTA on behalf of NIAID. Given their expertise, the selection of a suitable animal model should have been a straightforward matter rather than a contentious one requiring concealment. One possible explanation for why experts would choose an inappropriate model is that they were in a hurry and suitable mice were not available. As per a 2015 paper in Virology, the first transgenic mice for MERS research were bred by Dr Agarwal at the University of Texas. Laboratory mice specially bred such as those developed by Dr Baric for his research into the original SARS are not susceptible to MERS. Baric certainly has the expertise to breed his own, given sufficient time. In 2020, he filed an invention report with UNC-CH (UNC ref 18752) for a mouse adapted model to test SARS-CoV-2 countermeasures.
On December 16, 2019, the day before Moderna signed the Baric MTA for the jointly owned Moderna/NIAID mRNA coronavirus vaccines, the company signed an amendment to the July 2019 NIAID research collaboration agreement. This amendment was countersigned by Vincent Feliccia, the branch chief of NIAID Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Office, on January 13, 2020, the day the design of Moderna’s SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was finalised.
Intentional scientific misconduct for financial gain is fraud. In addition to publishing the mRNA-MERS rabbit data in its supplementary stock offer, Moderna used it to apply for a patent for an mRNA-betacoronavirus vaccine on February 28, 2020. The same patent covers Spikevax, its Covid-19 vaccine. The US Patent Office is notoriously poor at detecting scientific fraud in patent applications even when it is in the public domain. In 2014 it astonishingly issued a patent to Dr Hwang Woo-suk for a technique to clone human embryos although the associated journal paper had been retracted in 2005 due to the data having been faked. Unlike drug regulators, the Patent Office apparently does not require the use of validated animal models, or a justification for the selection of a given model.
As was widely reported in 2021, Moderna and NIAID became embroiled in a dispute over the NIAID’s ownership interest in mRNA-1273. The company omitted to include Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, Dr Barney Graham and his boss, Dr John Mascola, when it filed for its patent. An NIH spokesperson told CBS news: ‘Omitting NIH inventors from the principal patent application deprives NIH of a co-ownership interest in that application and the patent that will eventually issue from it.’
As of the end of February 2023, Moderna is reported to have earned $36billion from Spikevax. Despite the ongoing patent dispute with NIAID, following negotiations in December 2022 the company gave NIH a $400 million ‘catch-up royalty payment’.
Under the provisions of the Bayh-Dole Act, US government researchers are also entitled to receive up to $150,000 in royalties annually if their inventions are commercialised. Meanwhile, despite Bancel’s initial enthusiasm for sharing the mRNA-MERS rabbit data, it soon disappeared. Perhaps that’s because it’s hard to see how their indemnity shield under the US Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act stretches that far.
When he retired in December 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was the highest-paid federal employee and the recipient of the largest federal retirement package in history.
Fauci’s successor, Dr. Jeanne M. Marrazzo, will soon take over leadership of the agency — and its $6.3 billion budget.
Fauci praised Marrazzo, telling CNN, “She’s very well-liked. She’s a really good person. I think she’s going to do a really good job.”
But some of her critics, including medical and public health experts interviewed by The Defender, questioned Marrazzo’s suitability for leading NIAID, citing her limited experience as a medical practitioner and her role in supervising clinical trials of remdesivir, a controversial drug used to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
Critics also called out her steadfast support for strict restrictions and countermeasures during the pandemic, and her receipt, since 1997, of more than $20 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and payments from Big Pharma — including from Gilead, the manufacturer of remdesivir.
Before being named director of the NIAID, Marrazzo was director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the UAB at Birmingham. She will replace Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, who has served as NIAID’s acting director following Fauci’s departure.
Commenting on the appointment, Brian Hooker, Ph.D., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said:
“It looks like Dr. Marrazzo will give us more of the same, unfortunately. Her flip-flopping, penchant for Big Pharma, and support of draconian public health (control) measures mean that she’ll take a reactionary posture to any ‘pandemic threat’ and may be as gleeful as Fauci at the prospect of new pandemics.
“I have dim hopes that she may learn some lessons while the investigations into Fauci lying to Congress play out. However, these bureaucrats don’t really believe that the law applies to them.”
The NIAID is the second largest center at the NIH. According to CNN, it “supports research to advance the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases,” as well as “research at universities and research organizations around the United States and across NIAID’s 21 laboratories.”
“Marrazzo fits the mold of every public health leader so far that has led the charge during the pandemic,” Dr. Kat Lindley, president of the Global Health Project and director of the Global COVID Summit, told The Defender.
Lindley added:
“My concern with Marrazzo is actually her Big Pharma ties, her lack of clinical experience with COVID-19 in particular, and her blatant ignorance on early treatment and support for unproven, scientifically debunked measures, in particular masking.
“Any scientist or physician should understand that masking has never proven to be effective and, in the case of children, even detrimental.”
Touted remdesivir as ‘silver bullet’ for treating COVID
During her tenure at UAB, the university served as one of the clinical trial sites for remdesivir, an antiviral originally developed by Gilead Sciences as a treatment for Hepatitis C and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
According to the NIH, the trial was intended “to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the investigational antiviral remdesivir in hospitalized adults diagnosed with coronavirus disease 2019.” Marrazzo supervised the UAB trial site.
UAB has long served as a research site for remdesivir. A February 2021 UAB report states, “Gilead entered into collaboration with the UAB-led Antiviral Drug Development and Discovery Center … to study remdesivir against coronaviruses” in 2014.
“These earlier studies enabled remdesivir to more quickly be tested and approved for human use as a treatment for COVID-19 when the 2020 pandemic struck,” UAB stated.
The trial results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in November 2020, found remdesivir shortened “the time to recovery in adults who were hospitalized with COVID-19 and had evidence of lower respiratory tract infection.”
Fauci later praised remdesivir as the “standard of care” for treating COVID-19.
However, according to investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel, studies “show that there are zero clinical benefits to injecting patients with remdesivir. Many studies show that remdesivir can severely injure vital organs such as the heart and kidneys.”
Yet, Marrazzo never disclosed a conflict of interest when publicly commenting on remdesivir, Schachtel said. She described it as a “silver bullet” in remarks shared with The Washington Post in July 2020, and in tweets praising the drug.
“Given the UAB-Gilead partnership, one would think that Dr. Marrazzo would refrain from commenting on issues through which she maintained a clear conflict of interest,” Schachtel wrote. “She did no such thing.”
According to the U.S. government’s Open Payments database, Marrazzo received seven payments from Gilead, totaling $2,474.93.
But as Marrazzo repeatedly praised remdesivir — and, according to Schachtel, has “never shown remorse” for this despite mounting evidence of the harm it has caused — she has repeatedly spoken out against hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19.
In June 2020, in reference to a study published in the NEJM claiming hydroxychloroquine is ineffective in protecting people from COVID-19, Marrazzo said these findings “should provide a very big nail in the coffin” for the use of this treatment.
The following month, Marrazzo called a video that went viral on social media describing hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19 “very irresponsible and despicable,” adding that she was “glad that video is hopefully not being shared very much.”
In October 2021, she said hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin hold “special appeal” to the unvaccinated.
Yet, in April 2020, prior to the conclusion of the remdesivir clinical trial, Marrazzo said, “We are using it [hydroxychloroquine] in our hospital … for a range of patients including when patients are beginning to deteriorate,” adding:
“And lots of media folks are asking what we think about hydroxychloroquine. And the reality is that we live and die by the evidence. And one issue is the argument about whether it’s even ethical to use these treatments when we don’t have the evidence.
“But I would get back to the compassionate use argument. When you have a patient who’s dying, you have to use what you can, what’s available.”
Cheerleader for COVID vaccines and Merck’s molnupiravir
Marrazzo has also praised COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. In May 2020, she was “hopeful” about the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial — despite its enrollment of only eight volunteers, saying “We don’t have the luxury of time here in this case.”
In January 2022, Marrazzo said “Vaccination makes the biggest difference” in fighting COVID-19, adding that “boosters, of course, are going to augment that protection.”
And in October 2021, Marrazzo praised molnupiravir, Merck’s antiviral pill for COVID-19, stating it had “extraordinary potential.” Results of a preprint study later showed the drug may fuel the development of new and potentially deadly variants of COVID-19.
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender Marrazzo “has been willfully blind to the failure of COVID-19 vaccines” and “appears incapable of mastering the four pillars of pandemic response to lead America through the next pandemic: 1) contagion control, 2) early treatment, 3) late treatment and 4) vaccination.”
A ‘slap in the face’ to vaccine, hospital protocol victims
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Marrazzo made frequent television appearances in which, according to a UAB statement, she “helped inform the world … sharing critical information and perspectives.” UAB touted Marrazzo as a COVID-19 expert during this period.
According to AL.com, Marrazzo was on Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s COVID-19 task force, supporting “emergency public health measures that closed business and mandated mask wearing.”
In March 2020, Marrazzo supported “flattening the curve,” calling on the public “to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.” In similar statements made on May 8, 2020, Marrazzo warned of a “backslide” if measures like social distancing were loosened.
In a June 2020 YouTube video, “Why you should wear a mask,” Marrazzo said, “Masks have contributed to the control of this pandemic in other communities.” She called for masks for schoolchildren over age 6 and included mask-wearing in a list of “Three basic rules” along with hand washing and social distancing.
In an article she co-authored and in which she highlighted “the intersection of the COVID-19, HIV, and STI pandemics,” Marrazzo drew parallels between wearing masks and wearing condoms, writing:
“Condoms reduce transmission of HIV and bacterial STIs effectively, if used adequately and consistently, but lack of access to condoms or perhaps even personal preference limits their utility.
“As a correlate to barrier protection, masking has proven effective to reduce the expulsion of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory virus droplets.”
The paper also repeated claims regarding the “lack of benefit” of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and vitamins C and D in treating COVID-19. Conversely, referring to the COVID-19 vaccines, the authors stated, “There were few serious adverse events in either arm, and there were no deaths related to the vaccine.”
Blaming the unvaccinated
In May 2021, she criticized loosened Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks, stating that because less than 50% were vaccinated in her community, she would still wear a mask indoors despite being fully vaccinated herself.
In July 2021 she warned of a “summer surge” that would be fueled by the unvaccinated.
In December 2021 Marrazzo again scolded the unvaccinated. “Your decision to get infected is unfortunately not just going to be affecting you,” she said. “It’s going to be serving a source of incredible infectiousness going forward.”
Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration, told KUSI News San Diego that Marrazzo “was completely wrong about COVID … Pushing pseudoscience, pushing … her belief that vaccines stopped the spread of the infection, that children have high risk, and that masks were efficacious.”
“Marrazzo represents everything that was done wrong in the handling of COVID,” said Gail Seiler, Texas chairperson, Projects and Content, for the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation and a survivor of the CDC’s COVID-19 hospital protocols, including administration of remdesivir.
Seiler told The Defender that Marrazzo advocated for no early treatment until the patient “worsened to the point of hospitalization,” and at that point to give remdesivir, “a drug that she profits from.”
Seiler added:
“Because of people like Marrazzo, patients in the hospital were given no hope of survival. Because of her ignoring the evidence, over a million people died who shouldn’t have.
“Her selection to the NIAID is a slap in the face to every family whose loved ones were killed by the protocols she profited from. And it exemplifies why the general public has lost trust in agencies such as the NIAID.”
Financial ties to Big Pharma
Marrazzo received a total of $20,405,337 in NIH grants for 67 studies between 1997 and 2023, according to NIH data. These grants ranged between $6,000 and $2.82 million and averaged over $304,000 per grant.
Open Payments data show Marrazzo has received $28,761,36 across 37 “general payments” and $152,208.42 across seven payments for “associated research funding,” including $18,636.59 in consulting fees, $4,500 in honorariums, and payments from companies such as Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead, Janssen and Abbott Laboratories.
Her employer, UAB, received at least two Gates Foundation grants pertaining to health-related research in recent years. This includes a June 2021 grant, “Modeling Impact of Service Delivery Redesign” totaling over $1.5 million, and a $124,921 grant in April 2020 for a project titled “COVID-19 CTA: HTS Core for screening compounds.”
UAB’s Division of Infectious Diseases boasts “an active research portfolio with approximately $39 million in external research funding.” Research specialties include “Pathogenesis of viral infections,” “Antiviral therapy,” “Travel medicine and international health” and “Host defenses and infectious diseases in immunocompromised patients.”
Big supporter of gain-of-function research
UAB also houses a BSL3 research laboratory, the Southeastern Biosafety Laboratory Alabama Birmingham (SEBLAB), funded in part by NIH. According to UAB, it is “one of a limited number of institutions,” adding that the university ranks “among the top 25 in funding from the National Institutes of Health.”
The university states that SEBLAB researchers are “able to bring their skills to bear on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and other issues directly relevant to biodefense and emerging infectious disease,” with a focus on NIAID “priority pathogens” and discovery of “new treatments to prevent or combat” diseases caused by infectious agents.
These projects have also included “Testing drugs on SARS-CoV-2,” a process involving growing the virus in SEBLAB. According to UAB researcher Kevin Harrod, Ph.D.,“We grow the viruses, measure them and provide them to the BARDA [the U.S. government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority] contractor.”
BSL3 and BSL4 laboratories across the U.S. and the world have been associated with controversial gain-of-function research, which some have said is responsible for the development and subsequent alleged leak from one such facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, leading to prominent calls to end such research.
According to Independent Institute, “Marrazzo’s views on the origin of COVID-19 are hard to find,” as are her views on gain-of-function research.
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a professor of international law at the University of Illinois who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender that Marrazzo’s selection signals that the NIH and NIAID have no intention of stopping gain-of-function research at BSL3 and BSL4 facilities.
Boyle said:
“They will have her in place to deal with the next pandemic that they know is coming out of their own BSL3 and BSL4 labs, just as Fauci dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic that came out of the Wuhan BSL4 and the University of North Carolina BSL3 and that Fauci and [former NIH Director] Francis Collins funded.
“Under her auspices NIAID will continue to research, develop, manufacture and stockpile every hideous type of Nazi biological warfare weapon known to humanity … There will be no end to it and to these death scientists like her … unless and until we stop them by criminal prosecutions.”
Boyle called Marrazzo a “Fauci clone, not an original and independent thinker,” adding, “The Bidenites and the globalists and Big Pharma behind them picked her to continue the Fauci/NIAID policies and programs across the board.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
A fascinating “what-might-have been” article published by The Brownstone Institute presents evidence that one White House meeting – later cancelled – might have prevented the lockdowns and much of the Covid madness that later ensued.
According to author Eric Hartmann, Stanford scientist Dr. John Ioannidis and a team of other “elite” scientists were set to meet with President Trump. The goal: Let the President know that every scientist didn’t think like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.
(Ioannidis later became famous, or infamous, for showing that, for most citizens, the Infection Fatality Rate for this virus was roughly the same or lower than the death risk of the flu.)
The article’s salient points hinge on my favorite taboo subject – “early spread” – as Ioannidis is among the group who believed many Americans had probably already been infected by this virus by mid-March 2020.
This would mean any lockdowns to slow or stop the spread – or “flatten the curve” – were probably pointless and would cause far more harm than these draconian, unprecedented “mitigation” measures would prevent.
For me, the article also raises this intriguing question: What did certain officials know (about virus origins and spread) … and when did they know this?
Although my formal “science education” ended in 11th grade, my parents and God bestowed me with common sense, which I’m going to employ in today’s thought exercise, which shows what I would have done if I was Donald Trump or if I was the Science King of the World in the first 75 days of 2020.
Something like the events that follow SHOULD have happened in the pivotal, history-changing weeks of early 2020.
The fact something like this did NOT happen provides another giant tell about how corrupt and captured our science establishment has become.
I’m no scientist, but here’s what I would have done ….
The key “known knowable” in the “virus origins” saga is perhaps this nugget of information:
On the last day of December 2019, Chinese officials reported a pneumonia-like illness of “unknown origins” to the World Health Organization.
For the entire global “public health” establishment, this was a Super Bowl-type event.
“Okay, guys, this might be the Big One we’ve all been predicting. Let’s all get hot and prove our expert bonafides and save the world,” etc.
What would I have done when this news hit the Emergency Bat Wire?
First, I would have asked, “Okay, what are the symptoms of this alleged/possible new disease?”
Next, I would have asked: “Is it possible this possible new virus was already infecting people outside of Wuhan?”
Knowing the symptoms of this new disease are almost exactly like Influenza-Like Illnesses (ILI), I would have immediately started looking at all the weekly ILI “Surveillance Reports” produced by all 50 U.S. state health agencies and the CDC.
I would have asked: “Have we had a conspicuous spike of people going to the doctor with similar symptoms? For example, are people getting more flu tests than in previous flu seasons?”
The next thing I would have done is told all my public health colleagues: “Guys, we need to develop an antibody assay to test for this new disease ASAP.”
After our crack scientists and medical labs had developed a suitable antibody test (China had one by late January 2020), I would have said: “We need to test ‘archived’ blood we already have in storage and see if any Americans had developed antibodies to this virus before, say, Dec. 30, 2019.”
My nextQuestion: “Do we have any stored archived blood we can actually test for Covid antibodies?”
Answer: As it turns out, we do.
The Red Cross (and several other blood-bank organizations) actually collects tens of thousands of pints of blood every single day. One assumes at least some of this blood must be saved for weeks or months.
I would then order that we expedite the testing of every vial of “archived blood” in the country – Blood from California, Washington, New Jersey, Florida, Nebraska, Texas, Alabama – from all 50 states.
The whole purpose of this exercise would be to provide data and intelligence on how many people may have already been infected by this virus.
As Science King, I’d order that we use our invaluable new antibody-diagnostic tool to test samples collected from October 2019 through February 2020.
This way we could see if more blood donors in January had Covid antibodies than in November. If this was the case, we’d have what some might call “a virus-spread situation.”
Another point I would have made: Why do we have to depend on the Red Cross to provide us blood we can test for antibodies? We’re the U.S. Government; can’t we start collecting our own blood? Tell people it’s for a good cause – “Science.”
Apparently, the U.S. only had one batch of archived blood that could be tested ….
As readers of Bill Rice, Jr’s Substack Newsletter surely know by now, the CDC identified ONE tranche of saved Red Cross blood from three states, with that blood having been collected Dec. 13-16, 2019.
But surely this was not the only archived blood that had been saved and could have been tested (given that this was, after all, a “national emergency” – The Mother of All Live Exercises.)
But let’s say this was the only 1,900 vials of blood in the country available for antibody testing.
I would have said: “Okay, let’s at least go ahead and test that blood … but let’s test it as fast as we can …. Before we order the whole country to lock down.”
At some point, these 1,900 pints of Red Cross blood were tested for Covid antibodies, but, to this day, nobody knows WHEN these preserved blood specimens were tested. For all we know, that blood might have been tested by the end of February 2020 (weeks before the lockdowns were ordered) … or in September 2020, nine months after the blood had originally been collected.
All we know is the CDC (itself) published a “study” in late November 2020 telling everyone that at least 39 of those blood donors (2.04 percent of the tested cohort) did test positive for IgG (and/or IgM) antibodies via an ELISA antibody test.
So, to be clear, the dad-blasted virus was here – in at least three U.S. states in November 2019. That’s what the CDC’s own antibody test showed.
And President Trump – and Bill Rice, Jr. – could have known this by March 2020 if the Science officials had just put a “rush job” on the testing project. I mean, how long does it really take to test 1,900 units of blood for antibodies? Probably a couple of days.
I also note that the “Red Cross Antibody Study” results were published AFTER the 2020 presidential election – when the vaccine had already begun to be rolled out.
We also know (I think) President Trump wasn’t told anything like this in the weeks between January and March 2020:
“Mr. President, we’ve got a lot of blood we are currently testing to see if any Americans might have had this virus in November or December 2019. It’s possible, sir, this virus was already spreading pretty widely in America a couple of months ago. If this is the case, lockdowns to slow or stop virus spread probably won’t do much good.”
For what it’s worth, my conjecture is that SOMEONE in our Science/Virus-Fighting Leadership didn’t want the President (and/or the public) to know this non-trivial information.
Certainly nobody ordered any Red Cross archived blood to be tested as soon as possible.
(Also, just as certainly, no Cracker Jack investigative journalist at The New York Times,Wall Street Journalor “Sixty Minutes” asked any questions like: “Is there any evidence this virus has already been spreading around the world?”)
My main point is that nobody at NIH, NIAID, the HHS, the CDC or any member of the White House’s Covid Leadership Team said, “Let’s hold on here. Let’s see what these blood donor antibody tests tell us.”
When it came to locking down a couple billion people on the planet, why check any antibody test results first?
So what does this basic information tell us?
It tells me “someone” wanted to conceal evidence of early spread in America … that these trusted public health officials didn’t want to “confirm” anything that might stop or “call-off” the lockdowns.
… and, if we didn’t have the lockdowns, we might not have had 250 million Americans lining up to get a rushed, experimental” mRNA “vaccine,” a shot that was mandatory for many Americans if they wanted to keep their jobs or keep attending college.
Eric Hartmann’s article is about a White House meeting that did NOT take place, a meeting that might have changed history for the better if it had taken place.
Regarding Hartmann’s article, I’d simply highlight the topics that could and should have been brought up at said non-meeting … but weren’t … for some reason.
So what might this reason have been?
My strong hunch is that “someone” (or several people) knew, or at least strongly suspected, that this virus had already spread around the world, including America.
This prompts one final question: How in the hell could this person or people have known this?
It seems to me they knew what they didn’t want anyone to investigate. They didn’t want anyone to find undeniable evidence of early spreadand then publicize said evidence to the entire world. Again, how did these people know or suspect what those investigations would have revealed?
University officials and proponents of the new facility argue the laboratory is necessary to enhance research capabilities looking into emerging diseases and viruses resulting from zoonotic — animal-to-human — transfer.
While CSU denies that gain-of-function research will occur at the laboratory, some researchers connected with the new facility previously were associated with actors involved with such research, including experiments conducted in Wuhan, China.
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois, is concerned about the facility.
Boyle told The Defender :
“It is well known that Colorado State University has a long and ongoing history of specialization in weaponizing insects with biowarfare agents for delivery to human beings.
“This new lab will magnitudinally increase CSU’s offensive biowarfare capabilities, in gross violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that provides for life in prison.”
Area residents, including a local grassroots group, and bioweapons experts, also have raised concerns over the potentially risky research, involving deadly viruses, that will be conducted at the facility and the risk of a lab leak akin to that which may have occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and may have led to escape of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Christine Bowman leads a group of local citizens who formed the Covid Bat Research Moratorium of Colorado (CBRMC), a grassroots initiative opposing the new facility. The group has launched efforts such as a yard sign campaign to raise local awareness.
In an interview with The Defender, Bowman described being “stonewalled” by state and local officials and by CSU.
“We need answers as to how COVID-19 was modified to transfer from human to human before I will be satisfied that it’s okay to raise diseased bats to study in my neighborhood,” Bowman said.
“Now that we know that the COVID pandemic likely started from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, we are questioning the safety of continuing such research,” she added.
CSU receives ‘tens of millions of dollars’ in NIH research grants annually
According to The Colorodoan, the Chiropteran Research Facility, as it will be known, “would serve as a breeding facility to raise and care for bats of various species that can be used as research models in studies on a wide range of human viruses that are believed to have originated with bats.”
The laboratory will be constructed on the south end of CSU’s Foothills Campus near Fort Collins, at 3105 Rampart Road, within the Justin Harper Research Complex and adjacent to the university’s existing Center for Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases (CVID). It will consist of a 14,000-square-foot stand-alone bat vivarium.
According to CSU, the university “is a world leader in research on zoonotic infections. The University’s scientists have been studying bats and other vectors that transmit dengue fever, Zika and West Nile viruses for more than 30 years.”
Construction is scheduled to begin by this summer. The Colorodoan reported the facility is expected to open in fall 2024, while CSU said it will be completed by 2025.
CVID, formerly known as the Arthropod-born and Infectious Diseases Laboratory, was founded in 1984. According to The Colorodoan, it “currently houses the only captive breeding colonies of two species of bats used in its research.”
CVID’s website describes the facility as “a longstanding multi-disciplinary research and training center” whose researchers “have been successful in defining mechanisms of pathogen persistence and transmission, and developing new surveillance, control, and prevention strategies for vector-borne and emerging zoonotic diseases.”
“World-class facilities, including BSL-3 [biosafety level 3] laboratories and large insectary complexes, provide an outstanding scientific environment for researchers inside and outside CSU wanting to manipulate pathogens in vertebrate hosts and arthropod vectors,” the CVID website states.
In October 2021, the NIH awarded a $6.7 million grant to CSU’s microbiology, immunology and pathology department at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences to construct the new bat vivarium.
Alan Rudolph, CSU’s vice president for research, told The Coloradoan the university will provide the remaining funds for the facility’s construction, the cost of which is expected to range between $8-9 million.
Rudolph said CSU receives “tens of millions of dollars” in NIH research grants annually.
‘Highly pathogenic’ agents will be housed at new facility
According to the minutes of the Feb. 3, 2022, meeting of CSU’s Board of Governors, the new facility is justified due to the capacity it will have to study “emerging zoonotic viruses that originate in bats and cause high mortality in humans: SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Nipah virus and Hendra virus.”
It is unclear under what biosafety level the new facility will operate, but Bowman told The Defender :
“From what I understand, this facility is slated to be a BSL2. But what’s to keep that from increasing in the future without approval or informing the general public? What guarantee do the residents of Fort Collins have that the lab won’t increase from a BSL2 to BSL4, where even more dangerous viruses will be studied?”
“Who decides what criteria we use for ‘concern’?” Bowman asked.
Rebecca Moritz, CSU’s biosafety director, said, “This will be the only facility like it in the United States,” and it will give students “the opportunity to learn directly from the researchers conducting this research in their classes.”
She added:
“CSU researchers have safely studied and worked with bats and other vectors for over 30 years. … Due to global warming and population growth, humans and animals are coming into contact more frequently and in ways not previously seen. This could result in an increased number of outbreaks and possibly pandemics.
“The main purpose of this facility will be to house bat breeding colonies for CSU researchers and researchers around the United States and the world. This facility will allow an expansion of CSU’s current work, including projects focusing on the role that bats play in disease transmission and the development of vaccines and therapeutics.”
“Personnel who will work in this facility will be highly trained and be required [to] adhere to strict biosafety and biosecurity practices,” Moritz claimed.
Moritz has spoken publicly about her involvement with gain-of-function research, including at the 2014 Gain of Function Symposium. At the time, Moritz was part of the Biosecurity Task Force at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bowman said gain-of-function experiments are already being conducted at CSU and that the university is open about it.
“We are only aware that CSU is conducting gain-of-function on plants and mosquitoes because it is mentioned in the link they send to anyone who emails them or questions their research.”
Rudolph told The Colorodoan, “Bat research is not new to our campus; bat-research facilities are not new to our campus. It’s an expansion of existing work in existing facilities that have already made great impacts.”
Such research “helped us to develop vaccines, helped us to develop diagnostics to better determine who’s getting sick, why are they getting sick, when are they getting sick, and vaccines that help treat those people when they do get sick,” he added.
The Nipah virus, for instance, has a high human mortality rate ranging between 40 and 75%. It “causes a rapidly progressive disease, which includes acute respiratory infection and encephalitis that can lead to coma or death.”
Local activists ‘stonewalled’ by university, state, local officials
According to The Colorodoan, CSU’s campus planner, Gargi Duttgupta, told local authorities that the new facility would be approximately 316 feet north of the fence that marks the campus’ boundary with adjacent residential communities.
This may be too close for comfort for some area residents, who have attempted to engage with CSU and with local planning authorities to express opposition to the new facility and to obtain further information about its construction.
Their opposition led to the establishment of CBRMC, “a nonpartisan grassroots organization run on a budget of $0 by a group of concerned citizens from across the political spectrum.”
CBRMC says its mission is to put a moratorium on the construction of the new facility “until we first know what happened with the possible COVID bat lab leak and gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.”
Some CBRMC members spoke at a Dec. 21, 2022, meeting of the Larimer County Planning Commission, expressing fears of a potential leak from the new facility, drawing comparisons with the suspected Wuhan lab leak.
But the planning commission unanimously approved the project. Lesli Ellis, Larimer County’s community development director, told The Colorodoan that no further approvals are needed before construction can commence.
According to The Colorodoan, “CSU officials insist that the new facility is merely an extension of work that has been done on its Foothills Campus for more than 30 years by the university and others, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
The CSU Foothills Campus houses labs operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Wildlife Research Center and the Rocky Mountain Prevention Research Center — described as the “second-largest CDC lab outside of Atlanta.”
“Strict safety protocols will be in place to prevent the escape of a virus or infected bat,” The Colorodoan also reported.
Rudolph told The Colorodoan the facility will need only dozens to hundreds — not thousands — of bats, which will be acquired by the U.S. government, “quarantined well outside the United States and deemed safe and not sick before they come to us.”
CSU does ‘not have a good track record’ on safety
A Jan. 11 CSU “Q&A on why CSU labs are safe” denies that illegal bioweapons research will take place at the institution and quotes Moritz, who said, “We do everything possible to decrease the risks of our research.” However, she acknowledged “there is no such thing as zero risk in research.”
Bowman said CSU alone will oversee safety at the new facility, and she questioned the lab’s safety record.
Bowman told The Defender :
“After letting chronic wasting disease [CWD] leak from their labs at CSU, hundreds of thousands of the deer population were killed from the disease. They do not have a good track record of ensuring the safety or containment of diseases.
“I personally do not have the data for this claim, but I have heard many people cite this as fact and no one at CSU is refuting the claim.”
CWD, “a contagious neurological disease that affects members of the deer family, causing erratic behavior and weight loss that eventually results in death,” was identified in 1967. It is described as “a mysterious malady intricately tied to Fort Collins.” The federal government declared a CWD state of emergency in 2001.
The Colorodoan reported that CWD “was related to scrapie in sheep and goats, mad cow disease in cattle and the fatal variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.”
As reported by Northern Colorado NPR affiliate KUNC, “Chronic wasting disease is not your garden variety infectious disease. It’s not bacterial, viral or even fungal. It’s caused by something we all have inside our bodies — something called prions.”
CSU is home to the Prion Research Center, which “studies the biochemistry, genetics, and pathogenesis of prions, the causative agent of incurable and often fatal diseases in humans and animals,” including bovine spongiform encephalopathy, classic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, CWD and scrapie.
According to the Prion Research Center, “Growing evidence also links the prion mechanism to proteins involved in the pathogenesis of other common neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and forms an emerging area of the center’s studies.”
And in 2019, CSU reported that Prion Research Center scientists “have developed a new gene-targeted approach” to study CWS in mice. Described as a “real breakthrough,” the scientists “replaced the gene that encodes the prion protein in the mouse and replaced it with an exact replica of the code from either deer or elk.”
Researchers who spoke to The Colorodoan said that while it’s unclear if CWD originated in Fort Collins, it is hypothesized that it crossed species and spread there.
A U.S. Geological Survey map shows a significant cluster of CWD near Fort Collins and that cases identified elsewhere have been connected to the region.
“For the 16 [CWD] clusters in the first 40 years, the text mining process generated evidence supporting the trace back to Fort Collins for the first six clusters, five more clusters could be traced back to infected area linked to Fort Collins, and in 5 clusters the evidence supported an explanation for tracing the disease back to an area linked to Fort Collins.
“The evidence does not definitively exclude other theories for the disease origin. At minimum, Fort Collins was a primary catalyst in the widespread distribution of the disease.”
The paper noted, “As with COVID-19, government agencies can be reluctant to acknowledge potential culpability for releasing a devastating disease,” adding that “Ignoring the likely origin of this disease discounts the lax management of captive animals that has been the driving force for this biological disaster.”
Locals getting mixed messages from CSU officials
Local activists are concerned about a lack of communication between CSU officials, local authorities and the community, and contradictory statements they have received from CSU.
According to the CBRMC, CSU “gave citizens short notice on Nov. 30, 2022” about the public hearing, which was “held on the inconvenient date of Dec. 21, 2022 — snuck into holiday break.”
Since then, CSU has “not conducted any informational meetings with the public regarding their proposed research lab,” the CBRMC says on its website.
Bowman said a fact sheet about the facility was distributed at the meeting, stating that “SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, Ebola virus, Marburg, Nipah virus and Hedra virus” would be studied at the lab, confirming information included in the February 2022 CSU Board of Governors report.
However, according to Bowman, Moritz said at the public hearing, “At this facility, we will not be able to study MERS, SARS-CoV-2 [or] Ebola viruses.”
“So, which is it, are they proposing to study these diseases in our backyard or not?” Bowman asked.
Bowman noted that the same fact sheet contains “a photo displayed prominently on the front with a person’s gloveless hand holding a bat.” She remarked:
“When you are touting the strength of your ability to do dangerous bat research with safety first and foremost, maybe you shouldn’t incorporate a photo of an irresponsible way to handle a bat.
“Couldn’t this be one way bat diseases transmit to humans and is proving our point that bats and humans shouldn’t mix, especially in a lab setting?”
An April 5 email from Greg Harrison, CSU associate vice president of Strategic Communications, to Bowman, said, “We do not have any public meeting about the facility scheduled at this time.”
This was despite a Jan. 24 email from Moritz to Bowman saying CSU was “working on a process to engage the public this spring to discuss the project and lab safety and security, as well as our commitment to the wellbeing of people in Colorado and around the world.”
Both emails are posted in CBRMC’s Facebook group. In the same group, Bowman referenced a March 15 Town Hall meeting with Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) where the issue was to be raised. According to Bowman, “Sen. Hickenlooper chose not to answer any [questions] re: concern over CSU’s COVID bat lab.”
Bowman said this was not the only instance where elected officials ignored the concerns of local residents. She told The Defender :
“The community has been sending this information to our elected officials, who have also stonewalled us. I got no response from Sen. Hickenlooper.
“The response I got from Sen. Michael Bennet [D-Colo.] spoke about diversity, equity and inclusion and did not address the subject of bat research at all. The mayor of Fort Collins [Jeni Arndt] says that it is not in her jurisdiction and was uninterested.”
Bowman said that local residents deserve answers. She told The Defender :
“I believe that the residents of this county, state, and this country deserve answers to our questions regarding any potential danger to the public from this type of research considering the mayhem and destruction that the COVID virus unleashed on mankind.
“We do not want a repeat, and I think we should be allowed to have some say in what happens in our backyard. The fact that CSU is stonewalling their neighbors speaks volumes.”
Collaboration between CSU scientists, NIH, EcoHealth Alliance on bat viruses
Documents obtained by USRTK following several Freedom of Information Act requests indicate that plans for the new facility date back prior to receipt of the NIH grant in 2021, while key figures involved with the laboratory are connected to the EcoHealth Alliance and prior research involving SARS-CoV-2.
According to USRTK, the documents reveal that in February 2017, personnel of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Cooperative Biological Engagement Program “announced a new global bat alliance,” which would “build and leverage country and regional capabilities to generate an enhanced understanding of bats and their ecology within the context of pathogens of security concern.”
This new alliance was a collaboration between CSU, EcoHealth Alliance and the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories with the goal of building a bat research facility at CSU.
USRTK’s documents reveal that this original alliance grew into a group which became known as Bat One Health Research Network, whose scientists, including CSU and Rocky Mountain Laboratories researchers, were developing “scalable vectored” and “self-disseminating” vaccines to spread contagiously between bats.
These vaccines are purportedly aimed at preventing “emergence and spillover” of potential pandemic viruses from bats to humans. However, at least as far back as 2020, concerns were raised about the unintended consequences of releasing genetically engineered self-spreading “vaccines” into the wild.
Bat One Health also harkens to the “One Health” concept, which purports to serve as “an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems,” but which some experts have argued lowers human health to the level of animals and aims to surveil and control all life on Earth.
Notably, the term “One Health” is said to have first been coined by the EcoHealth Alliance, which today is a strong proponent of this concept.
A March 30, 2020, email obtained by USRTK, from Tony Schountz, Ph.D., associate professor in CSU’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, to Jonathan Epstein, vice president for Science and Outreach at EcoHealth Alliance, discusses the importation of bats and rats infected with dangerous pathogens such as the Lassa virus.
In another set of emails from 2018, Schountz communicated with scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In an Oct. 30, 2018, email, Schountz proposed a “loose association” between CSU and the Wuhan lab, involving “collaboration on relevant projects” involving bat-borne viruses and arboviruses.
Indicating the connection between the research planned to take place at the new facility, and COVID-19, Rebekah Kading, Ph.D., assistant professor in CSU’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, said, “This facility is especially timely considering the current COVID-19 pandemic, since some groups of bats have an evolutionary association with coronaviruses.”
According to CSU, the university has a partnership with Zoetis, which it describes as “the world’s leading animal health company,” “for the construction in 2020 of an incubator research lab in the Research Innovation Center on the Foothills campus.”
Zoetis was previously Pfizer Animal Health, before separating from Pfizer in June 2013.
Big Pharma, NIH interested in developing vaccines related to viruses to be researched at new CSU facility
Big Pharma has shown interest in developing mRNA vaccines targeting many of the same deadly pathogens that will be researched at CSU’s new facility.
For instance, in July 2022, Moderna announced the launch of its Phase 1 clinical trial of the mRNA-1215 vaccine candidate, “designed to fight the Nipah virus.” The vaccine was developed in collaboration with NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center.
In an NIH statement, Fauci said “Nipah virus poses a considerable pandemic threat because it mutates relatively easily, causes disease in a wide range of mammals, can transmit from person-to-person, and kills a large percentage of the people it infects,” adding that “The need for a preventive Nipah virus vaccine is significant.”
Efforts to develop a Nipah virus vaccine date back to at least January 2017, when CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) issued a call for proposals for the development of vaccines for the Nipah and Lassa viruses and MERS, soon after its official launch at that year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum.
EcoHealth Alliance researchers have long shown interest in viruses such as Nipah. A 2006 article in the Current Infectious Disease Reports journal titled “Nipah virus: impact, origins, and causes of emergence” was co-authored by Epstein, for instance.
At the time, Epstein was affiliated with the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, which later merged with the Wildlife Trust to become the EcoHealth Alliance.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
Less than a year after successfully winning the fight to force Pfizer to release their COVID-19 vaccine trial data that the FDA was attempting to block for 75 years, ICAN’s Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq., joins Del with a new, updated ruling, and great news about what this ruling means for Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID vaccine trial data.
Biden’s new pick for Head of the NIH, Monica Bertagnolli, received more than 290 million in grants from Pfizer. This appointment comes more than a year after former director, Francis Collins, left the beleaguered agency. With deep ties to Pfizer and the cancer industry, she joins a roster of agency heads with questionable conflicts of interest, contributing to a growing distrust of our health agencies now seemingly beyond repair.
American health agencies are in a crisis of their own making. The pandemic response has both amplified and spotlighted the classic shortcomings and limitations of agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
News this week reports Biden has chosen Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, formerly National Cancer Institute Director, to lead the NIH. Bertagnolli fills the absence left by Dr. Francis Collins.
In a post-Covid world, much of the public-facing legacy of agency directors is written by their actions during the failed pandemic response. History will show it as a doomed era where no leadership escaped without tarnished careers from their unified actions to viciously mandate Covid shots, mask kids, keep schools closed and lockdown society causing irreparable harm to the American economy – all without the science to back up their decisions.
Former NIH head Collins will be forever known as the man who shut down scientific debate at a time when open dialogue about the already known, published research could have saved lives, the economy, and the mental health of our current population. Purposely ignored warnings, which came in the form of the Great Barrington Declaration, that internal emails show Collins and Fauci colluded to publish a ‘devastating takedown’ of its premise using the full weight of their agencies and media power.
From 2015 through 2021, Bertagnolli received more than 116 grants from Pfizer, totaling $290.8 million. This amount made up 89% of all her research grants, according to Open Payments, a national transparency program under the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services that collects and publishes information about financial relationships between drug and medical device companies and certain health care providers.
Her extensive background in cancer research and ties to Pfizer and other pharma companies raises questions about the timing of her placement at the head of NIH, the largest single public funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world at more than $40 billion.
The Covid vaccine gold rush has come to an end for companies like Pfizer and Moderna. A brief look at headlines tells of the next profit push on the horizon being mRNA cancer vaccine therapies.
Meanwhile, an epidemic surge of cancers of unknown causes is also grabbing headlines.
Bertagnolli appears well-positioned to streamline an injectable pharmaceutical ‘answer’ to a growing cancer question while obscuring further investigation into its root cause(s).
Meanwhile, Walensky’s abrupt departure from a badly damaged CDC has public trust in the agency racing for the doors at breakaway speeds.
The FDA has done no better. After Trump’s director, Stehpan Hahn stepped down as the administration changed hands, Biden kept the agency without a presidential nomination for commissioner for the maximum time allowed by law – nearly one year.
In that time, the FDA pushed through emergency use authorizations for J&J’s Covid shot, expanded Pfizer’s EUA to 12-15 yr-olds and 5-11 yr-old, added EUA booster doses and mishandled massive warnings about increases in myocarditis, Guillain-Barre syndrome and thrombocytopenia after Covid shots. The agency’s authoritarian booster push also saw infighting due to a lack of data to inform the decision culminating in two of the FDA’s top, longtime vaccine regulators [Kruse & Gruber] departing in disgust.
A recent BMJ article titled The decline of science at the FDA has become unmanageable states, … the corruption of the FDA’s scientific culture remains the primary culprit driving the deterioration of safety and effectiveness standards.”
By all measures, America’s health agencies are in rapid decline as a litany of historical issues like Big Pharma’s revolving door influence, an outward mission-directed posture of mandates and censorship, a continued doubling down on bad policy, and an imbalance focusing on liability-free injectable products as the answer has left American marooned.
The path forward for American health, suffering in many categories, has challenges ahead. Yet the many failures and outright censorship of the medical and research communities during the failed pandemic response have created a new space being rapidly populated by medical professionals, experts, and citizen journalists who see the value and desperate need to investigate and report on reality, expose bad science and maximize open debate surrounding key health issues. It is the best of times and it is the worst of times.
Ralph Marxen Jr. had just turned 70 and was enjoying life with his wife of 49 years, Lynda, and his adult children and grandchildren. The Minnetonka, Minnesota, native was in good health and, according to his daughter, Nicole Riggs, walked long distances daily and wasn’t on any medications.
In August 2021, several members of Riggs’ household contracted COVID-19, including, presumably, her parents. A week later, while most family members were recovering, Marxen’s condition deteriorated leading him to be admitted to Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis on Aug. 23, 2021.
Marxen would never leave the hospital — he died there on Sept. 7, 2021.
During his stay, Marxen, who had not received a COVID-19 vaccine, was administered more than 50 medications, including remdesivir, vancomycin, fentanyl and midazolam, and in the days prior to his death, he was placed on a ventilator.
Riggs toldThe Defender the treatments she and her family requested for Marxen, including ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies and vitamins, were refused.
She said she did not believe her father’s refusal of the COVID-19 vaccines played a role in his illness — in fact, she argued that her father’s non-vaccinated status — and the COVID-19 protocols prescribed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — were factors in the treatment he received from the hospital and its medical staff.
‘Is this a hospital or a prison?’
“My dad went to the ER seeking help for dizziness and nausea,” Riggs said. “He was 70 years old and took no daily meds. He was unvaccinated and refused to take their unreliable PCR tests.”
In a separate interview with Minnesota’s Alpha News, Riggs said that two of her father’s friends had gotten vaccinated “and they both got vax-injured.” As a result, “He was adamant that he was not going to get the vaccine.”
“I think this played a part in him not getting good care,” Riggs told The Defender.
Riggs recounted the chain of events that led her father to end up in the hospital.
“In the middle of August 2021, my household of four, plus my parents, became ill with fever and fatigue, and a few of us had chest congestion,” Riggs said. “Myself, my husband and my two boys were spit-tested for COVID and were all told we were positive for COVID. We assumed my parents had the same.”
But after a week of being sick, she said they noticed that her father “didn’t seem to be bouncing back like the rest of us. He was having trouble walking to the bathroom because he was so weak and dehydrated.”
Due to his older age, his family “decided to call the ambulance and get him checked out,” Riggs said. Paramedics recommended Marxen go to the hospital for further evaluation, so he was admitted on Aug. 23, 2021, after an ER visit.
“From the beginning, the medical records indicate they wanted to get him on remdesivir even though they couldn’t get him to PCR test,” Riggs said.
“Within a day, a friend of the family who had been working with COVID patients for the past year told us to call the hospital and request that my dad be given monoclonal antibodies (a.k.a. Regeneron),” Riggs said. However, the nurse treating her father said he “had never heard of that before, and that was the end of that discussion.”
“That seemed strange to me, but I still trusted them at that time,” Riggs said.
The day after her father was admitted to the hospital, her mother also was admitted, after her oxygen levels dropped to the low 90s.
“My parents were soon hospital room neighbors,” Riggs said. “COVID medications were started, which we later learned was hospital protocol with remdesivir and dexamethasone.”
Despite being in neighboring rooms though, Riggs’ parents could not visit each other. “My mom wanted to go see my dad since he was in the room right next door, but she realized that her bed had an alarm that sounded when she tried to get up. She also learned that both of them were locked in their rooms as well,” Riggs said.
She added:
“My mom’s nurse thought ‘it wasn’t appropriate,’ and refused to let her go see my dad. They had to wait until that nurse was off her shift before the doctor would OK my mom to go into my dad’s room for a short visit.
“Is this a hospital or a prison?”
It wasn’t long before Riggs began to receive more disturbing updates about the treatment her parents were receiving in the hospital.
She told The Defender :
“My brother started a CaringBridge site to keep our whole family updated. It wasn’t long before I started to receive unsettling messages from people I knew and trust. One was from my dad’s old neurological chiropractor, saying ‘no remdesivir and no ventilator, that’s asking to die.’ He also sent me information on how to get a lawyer involved.
“It was then that I started to research and realize the dangers of the deadly hospital protocols put in place by the NIH and CDC, especially for those on Medicare, as the hospital is given a 20% bonus payment if certain steps are followed with those patients, starting with a positive COVID PCR test.”
According to Riggs, this was evident in her father’s medical records.
“One of the doctors actually wrote this in the medical records: ‘I don’t think it’s impossible to use remdesivir without a PCR positive,’” Riggs said, adding, “My dad initially refused a nasal PCR test because he knew they could be inaccurate and wanted to be treated by symptoms, not a PCR positive COVID test result.”
However, the hospital told Marxen and his family this was not possible. According to Riggs, the doctor said, “Certain treatments may not be available without PCR-proven COVID, and that if his condition worsened such that he required intubation, we would run the nasopharyngeal swab.”
“Basically, my dad was told he wouldn’t get access to ‘certain treatments’ until he submitted to their request to be PCR tested,” Riggs said. “And if he got bad enough, they would test him anyway.”
The hospital also told them if Marxen’s condition deteriorated enough that they needed to put him on a ventilator, they would do the test without his permission.
Her father finally “relented” and tested positive for COVID-19. That’s when the hospital administered remdesivir “and many other harmful drugs,” Riggs said, and denied their request for safer alternatives.
‘It all happened so fast’
From this point forward, “It all happened so fast,” Riggs said. Her father was transferred to progressive care on Aug. 26, 2021, and to the ICU the next day.
“My dad was denied visitation by anyone under the guise of ‘COVID isolation,’” Riggs said. “Even my mom, who was in the same hospital with COVID.”
Marxen’s condition quickly deteriorated. “My dad was told he needed to get on the ventilator so he could get relief and a feeding tube,” Riggs said. “By this time, my dad hadn’t slept in two days and hadn’t eaten in five days.”
“After two days in the ICU, he was freaking out, pulling off his mask and pulling out his IV,” Riggs said. “They got him ‘reoriented’ and brought in the doctor. If you knew my dad, you would know that this was totally out of character for him. He was the kindest, most loving man and father. He was one of my best friends.”
“Soon, he felt he had no other option but to be put on a ventilator,” Riggs said. “A decision he had to make scared and alone because we were kept from him … They had finally got him desperate enough to submit to getting on a ventilator.”
Marxen was intubated on Aug. 29, 2021, and placed on fentanyl and propofol, Riggs said, “even though, reading the records, they knew that wasn’t the solution, but they did it anyway.”
Riggs said she and her family again requested monoclonal antibodies be administered, “but were denied because it was too late in the progression of the disease to be a benefit.”
They also requested “vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin,” but were denied “and told they refused to go off of protocol, ‘because the one time we did that, the patient died,’” Riggs added.
“My dad’s medical records indicate vitamin D was ‘deemed not appropriate during this admission,’” Riggs noted. “We asked them to take him off vancomycin because that can make you retain fluid and he was already doing that. They told us no, and that the drug was ‘the gold standard.’”
‘He was kept from everyone that truly loved him’
According to Riggs, she would call the hospital every day at 6 p.m. for updates, and her brother would do so daily at 6 a.m. This continued until Sept. 7, 2021, the day her father would be placed “off quarantine” and allowed to see family members again.
However, “on Sept. 7, we were told that the ‘infectious disease team’ said he needed another seven days of quarantine,” Riggs said. “This decision was not even made by his ICU doctor.”
Instead, Riggs and her family were told “the nurses would set up a Facetime for us for the evening of Sept. 7,” Riggs said. “After that call, I was crying and pacing in my house. My thoughts were, ‘Are we going to just leave him in there to die alone?’ I needed to actually do something.”
Riggs said she decided to request her father’s medical records from the hospital, “so I could see exactly what was going on there.” However, she was told the records could not be released “unless he signed the release form” — even though her father was sedated and on a ventilator “and it wasn’t possible for him to sign anything.”
In response, the hospital told Riggs that she “would need to provide his death certificate for the records if we hadn’t already set up power of attorney.”
“So, he had to die before I could access his records?” Riggs asked. “How did this nightmare become our reality?”
Within a few hours of this exchange, Riggs received a call that her father was “actively dying” and if they wanted to see him, they needed to do it soon, because he would pass away during that night.
“Now that he was dying, we were able to come see him — but hours before we couldn’t? This made zero sense to me,” Riggs said.
On arriving at the hospital, she and other family members “were required to wear space-like soft helmets, which made it impossible to even kiss my dad goodbye.”
According to Riggs, she and her family “gave the OK to remove him from the ventilator so we could pray scripture over him through his transition.”
“I thought removing him from the ventilator would cause him to pass away because he couldn’t live without it,” Riggs said. “But I can’t help but wonder if that’s really how it went down. His records show that he was given fentanyl at 5:10 p.m. and midazolam at 5:32 p.m. He passed away at 6:22 p.m.”
Riggs said the “official” cause of death was determined to be “respiratory failure with underlying COVID-19.”
When her father died, he had multi-system organ failure. Riggs said she did not believe her father died of COVID-19, but instead due to the CDC- and NIH-approved protocols.
“He was isolated and kept from everyone that truly loved him for 16 days,” Riggs said. “Then, under the guise of ‘palliative care,’ he was finished off with fentanyl and midazolam.”
According to Alpha News, the price tag from the hospital for the treatment her father received during those 16 days was $1.2 million.
A statement provided by Abbott Northwestern to Alpha News said the following:
“Allina Health respects the privacy of its patients and is unable to comment on specific patient care.
“We have great confidence in the exceptional care our medical teams provide to our patients, which is administered according to evidence-based practices by our talented and compassionate care teams.”
‘To honor my dad, I have put my grief into action’
Riggs said her father’s death had knock-on effects on her and her family.
“Now my mom, who survived remdesivir, can’t afford to keep their home,” Riggs said. “She had to sell almost all of their possessions accumulated over 50 years to move into one of the bedrooms of my two-bedroom home. Two of my boys … now share a bedroom in our living room.”
“She can hardly make the bed without being out of breath and she struggles mentally with what they endured and getting a grasp on her new life without my dad in it,” Riggs added.
Despite these challenges, Riggs said that “to honor my dad, I have put my grief into action,” getting involved in activism for victims of hospital protocol deaths.
Riggs is now the Minnesota chair of the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, a national coalition that has documented cases involving COVID-19 care protocols at hospitals.
“I don’t want the families … to be isolated and alone in their pain of losing their loved one,” Riggs said, adding that she has launched weekly Zoom calls for Minnesota families and survivors of hospital protocols, and is also launching in-person meetups.
Riggs also recently attended the Halt Hospital Homicide rally, which she described as the “first national rally for hospital protocol deaths.”
She drew parallels with those who died of COVID-19 vaccine injuries. “The vax-injured are ignored and not believed, just like those of us who have had a family member die or get injured by the hospital protocols,” she said.
“My dad, Ralph, will go on in our memories as a wonderful husband of 50 years, dad, grandpa and great-grandpa, as well as a fun fisherman and the best homemade French fry maker around.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
The US staked a claim on half the world, as Senate Armed Services Committee chair Jim Inhofe said Washington might have to intervene in Venezuela if Russia dares set up a military base not just there, but “in our hemisphere.”
“I think that it could happen,” Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) told a group of reporters on Tuesday. “You’ve got a guy down there that is killing everybody. You could have him put together a base that Russia would have on our hemisphere. And if those things happen, it may be to the point where we’ll have to intervene with troops and respond.”
Should Russia dare encroach on the US’ neck of the woods, Inhofe said: “we have to take whatever action necessary to stop them from doing that.” … continue
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