Those who have been attending or listening to my recent talks and podcasts may have noticed that I have repeatedly stated that my opinion is that SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and somehow entered the general population approximately September 2019. Based on their report, this appears to also be the interim minority opinion of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions Minority Oversight Staff, which has been archived at the Malone Institute under the government corruption tab, and can be found here.
Here is the cautiously worded but still stunning conclusion of this interim report:
As noted by the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, the COVID19 Lancet Commission, and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence 90-Day Assessment on the COVID-19 Origins, more information is needed to arrive at a more precise, if not a definitive, understanding of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and how the COVID-19 pandemic began (see footnote). Governments, leaders, public health officials, and scientists involved in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic and working to prevent future pandemics, must commit to greater transparency, engagement, and responsibility in their efforts.
Based on the analysis of the publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident. New information, made publicly available and independently verifiable, could change this assessment. However, the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, or the presumption of accuracy. The following are critical outstanding questions that would need to be addressed to be able to more definitively conclude the origins of SARS-CoV-2:
What is the intermediate host species for SARS-CoV-2? Where did it first infect humans?
Where is SARS-CoV-2’s viral reservoir?
How did SARS-CoV-2 acquire its unique genetic features, such as its furin cleavage site?
Advocates of a zoonotic origin theory must provide clear and convincing evidence that a natural zoonotic spillover is the source of the pandemic, as was demonstrated for the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak. In other words, there needs to be verifiable evidence that a natural zoonotic spillover actually occurred, not simply that such a spillover could have occurred.
A summary of examples concerning how the corporate media have previously covered the “Lab Leak Hypothesis” explanation of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic can be found below:
By way of relevant historical context, on approximately 04 January, 2020 I received an unexpected phone call from Dr. Michael Callahan (known to me to have been a CIA agent, and separately confirmed to me by NY Times reporter Davey Alba in February 2022 as a “former” CIA agent).
During this call, Dr. Callahan revealed to me that he was calling from China, and that he was in country under cover of his Harvard Professor appointment. Further information regarding Dr. Callahan can be found in this article by Raul Diego, with research support by Whitney Webb, entitled “DARPA’s Man in Wuhan”. It is important to know that Callahan has provided advice in the White House to at least three US Presidents, including Obama and Trump.
On 04 January 2020, Dr. Callahan told me that there was a novel coronavirus circulating in the Wuhan region, it was looking like a significant biothreat, and I should get “my team” engaged in seeking ways to mitigate the risk of this new agent. My sense from this and subsequent discussions with Dr. Callahan over the next few months during 2020 was that he had been in China as part of an exchange program, sent there under his joint appointment at a Chinese sister hospital of the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, where he has maintained a faculty appointment since 2005.
Dr. Callahan asserted to me that he had been directly involved in managing hundreds of cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan during early 2020, and according to journalist Brendan Borrell, who has acted as a close ally of Dr. Callahan and published many stories (and a recent book) about his various exploits, Dr. Callahan escaped Wuhan surreptitiously by boat immediately prior to the lockdown of the region on 23 January 2020. If you believe Borrell’s story line (and I do not- Callahan is a CIA trained liar, and I have previously seen Borrell publish unverifiable falsehoods), the heroic Dr. Callahan first stepped into a Wuhan hospital the day before the lockdown:
He went to Wuhan anyway and hunkered down in a guest house, waiting to get the word from his friends. “They had to check in to make sure things were safe for me.” On Jan. 22, Callahan slipped on medical scrubs and donned an N95 mask and a pair of goggles to pass through the entrance of the Wuhan Central Hospital, a boot-shaped glass building rising up from the city’s empty streets. There, his colleagues registered him as a “guest clinical educator,” a title that would allow him into the wards as an observer. The next day, the city locked down. Callahan had just made it into the white-hot center of the outbreak.
Note the careful dissembling and cover that Borrell provides Callahan (and the CIA):
If he went to Wuhan, Callahan knew he couldn’t worry his wife by telling her about his plan. He had to be careful about telling anyone. He didn’t have official permission to travel there, after all. “It was not sanctioned, not authorized,” he said.
When Callahan set down his bag in the lobby of the Westin Hotel and was handed the key card to his room, he had to smirk. There’s 400 rooms in this hotel, and I get the same room every time? he thought. It was a fine room. Clean bathroom, firm mattress. It was also a tell. Ever since Chinese hackers stole a database containing information about his high-level security clearance, Callahan knew that someone might be watching his every move. “I’m not that good-looking of a guy, but you’d think I was Brad Pitt when I go down and get a beer,” he said. “Honeypots. But, you know, we get training for that.”
Who is the “we” that get training to avoid honeypots? Yet another tell….
Borrell now asserts that Callahan left Wuhan one week after his arrival:
All told, Callahan spent almost a week on the ground helping his colleagues keep the hospital functioning, learning about the virus’s toll on the human body, and taking note of what drugs doctors were throwing at the virus. Chinese officials were planning to tighten Wuhan’s quarantine measures, banning residents even from stepping out to buy food. Callahan slipped across the river by boat — “the black-market way” — and returned to Nanjing, where he and his colleagues had a video link with the ICU units in two hospitals in Wuhan and could provide advice and track patient outcomes. Callahan knew he needed to report what he was seeing to his friends in the U.S. government.
Which would mean that Callahan, who reported to me that he had helped manage hundreds of cases of COVID-19 while in Wuhan (600 as I recall Michael bragging, but Borrell says 277), did so early in the outbreak within a one week period. In retrospect, this is yet another lie.
Clearly this story told by Borrell is a limited hangout, as was his prior April 26, 2020 story that Callahan had examined a series of 6,000 Chinese cases during that time and discovered the activity of Famotidine as a COVID-19 treatment. I know for a fact that he never used Famotidine to treat COVID-19 while he was in Wuhan or later when he was managing the Diamond Princess outbreak and setting up the portable hospital in New York City, and only began looking into the potential efficacy after I reported to him on the findings of the group that I was leading (and my own personal experience self-treating with Famotidine when I was infected during the Boston Wuhan-1 outbreak at the end of Feb 2020).
To this point, when this false narrative was published in Science magazine, I requested from Borrell, Callahan, and Science Magazine a copy of the database which was purportedly used to make this discovery, and none of these were able to provide it. I once asked Borrell if he was also CIA, or as Callahan often says “a member of the secret handshake club”. Borrell denied any association, but there is no question in my mind that for some inexplicable reason Borrell has been publishing Callahan’s cover stories for many years. Like this one for example: “95,000 stranded at sea: What happens when a cruise ship becomes a hot zone”.
After returning from China to report to his longstanding close associate Dr. Bob Kadlac (then serving as the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response to the Trump administration), back in Washington DC, Callahan was then deployed to help managing both the Diamond Princess outbreak during the first week of February, 2020, as well as the March 08 Grand Princess outbreak. Which would mean that he would have arrived in Nanjing, China under cover of his Harvard appointment, beginning 22 Jan traveled to Wuhan and managed between 200 and 600 COVID-19 patients, emailed Bob Kadlac on Jan 28 alerting him of the emerging threat (weeks after he had called me), escaped Wuhan by boat returning to Nanjing, continued to monitor hospital COVID-19 management practices remotely from Nanjing, returned to Washington DC to report to Kadlac, and then deployed to the Diamond Princess in Japan during the first week of February.
And during this time, was supposedly was involved in a detailed statistical analysis of a 6,000 patient Chinese database (which no one else has ever seen) to discover that Famotidine is active against COVID-19. I know from personal communication with Michael that he then designed and managed deployment of the tent hospital in NY City, and then deployed to manage and set US policy for COVID-19 treatment and infection control in nursing homes. I also know that he presented the data from our research group at White House and WHO meetings as the support for advocating for Famotidine as a COVID-19 repurposed drug treatment, but did not present data from the ephemeral 6000 person Chinese data base analysis.
As for myself, I downloaded the sequence of the “Wuhan Seafood Market Virus” available on the NIH servers on January 10, and got busy with volunteers from the DTRA-funded project group at Alchem Laboratories in Alachua Florida, which contract (focused on use of biorobots and computational modeling to identify inhibitors of organophosphate chemical toxins) I had helped write and win and for which I was then serving as project manager. I directed the group to focus on identifying repurposed drugs which could inhibit the Papain-like protease of the virus (3-ClPro) as opposed to the main serine protease (M-Pro) which has been the primary focus of Pharmaceutical company research into SARS-1 inhibitors.
Computational docking studies lead to a ranked priority list which included Famotidine, and I confirmed the activity of this agent by treating myself after I was infected during the last week of February 2020. Jill got busy beginning January 04 after the Callahan call, and with my help wrote and self-published (Amazon) a book designed for a lay audience to help them prepare and protect themselves from the novel coronavirus. The highly referenced book (written by a PhD and an MD/MS with decades of experience in infectious disease outbreaks) was published during the first week of February, 2020, and was censored/deleted by Amazon in March 2020 due to “violating community standards” which were not otherwise specified at the time. No appeal.
The fact that Jill and I were able to produce and published this book in a month has been cited by some conspiracy theorists as evidence that I was “in on the game” well before January 04, but I can assure you that this is merely a testimony to the commitment and efforts of Dr. Jill-Glasspool Malone to warn and help our friends, community, social media followers, and the general population. To have this product of such hard work and commitment summarily deleted without appeal by Amazon was deeply damaging to her morale, as it would be to yours.
On a side note, early in February 2020, I directly asked Michael for his opinion on the possibility that the “2019 Novel Coronavirus” (not yet named SARS-CoV-2) originated from a laboratory. His response was that “my people have carefully analyzed the sequence, and there is no evidence that this virus was genetically engineered”. We now know that this was another lie, and that there is clear evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered.
Based on this timeline and history, as well as my own direct personal communication with Dr. Callahan, I strongly suspect that both the gross clinical mismanagement of ventilatory support during the first phase of the outbreak (responsible for up to 30,000 deaths) as well as the stunningly poor management practices of Nursing Home and Extended Care facilities throughout the USA can be directly traced to the influence of Dr. Michael Callahan, DARPAs Man in Wuhan and arguably the top US Government/CIA expert in both biowarfare and gain of function research.
Consistent with this being a limited hangout, much later during early 2022 I received a call from Dr. David Hone, Ph.D., a longtime associate (since he was a post-doctoral student at University of Maryland) and former employee of Dr. Robert Gallo’s Institute of Human Virology, in which he told me that Callahan was not present in Wuhan on January of 2020, that “we did not have anyone there at that time”, and that I should stop asserting otherwise. Dr. Hone was serving as a GS-15 rank DTRA CB civilian rank employee of the DoD at the time, essentially as the Chief Scientific Officer of DTRA CB. Clearly, this timeline is a sensitive topic, and deserves further congressional investigation. Sworn testimony from both Drs. Hone and Callahan should be obtained.
Robert W. Malone is a physician and biochemist. His work focuses on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research. You can find him at Substack and Gettr
Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Dr. Pierre Kory is a Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialist, Teacher/Researcher. He is also the President Emeritus of the non-profit organization Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance whose mission is to develop the most effective, evidence/expertise-based COVID-19 treatment protocols.
The only way to restore public trust in vaccination – which has taken a big hit since the lies attending the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine – is to put a well-known vaccine skeptic in charge of the vaccine research agenda. The ideal person for this is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the same time, we must put rigorous scientists with a proven track record of evidence-based medicine in charge of determining the type of study designs to use. Two ideal scientists for this are Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, who have been nominated to lead the NIH and FDA, respectively.
Vaccines are – along with antibiotics, anesthesia, and sanitation – one of the most significant health inventions in history. First conceived in 1774 by Benjamin Jesty, a farmer in Dorsetshire, England, the smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. Operation Warp Speed, which rapidly developed the Covid vaccines, saved many older Americans. Despite this, we have seen a sharp increase in general vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine scientists and public health officials who did not conduct properly randomized trials made false claims about vaccine efficacy and safety and established vaccine mandates for people who did not need the vaccines, sowing suspicion and damaging public trust in vaccination.
What went wrong? The purpose of the Covid vaccines was to reduce mortality and hospitalization, but the randomizedtrials were only designed to demonstrate short-term reduction in Covid symptoms, which is not of great public health importance. Since the placebo groups were promptly vaccinated after the emergency approval, they also failed to provide reliable information about adverse reactions. Despite these flaws, it was falsely claimed that vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural infection-acquired immunity and that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission.
Governments and universities then mandated the vaccines for people with superior natural immunity and for young people with very low mortality risk. These mandates were not only unscientific but with a limited vaccine supply, it was unethical to vaccinate low-mortality-risk people when the vaccines were needed by older high-risk people around the world.
Since government and pharmaceutical companies lied about the Covid vaccine, are they also lying about other vaccines? Skepticism has now spread to tried-and-true vaccines that are proven to work.
And there are real, unanswered vaccine safety questions. Seminal work from Denmark has shown that vaccines can have both positive and negative non-specific effects on non-targeted diseases, and that is something that must be explored in greater depth. Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) scientists studying asthma and aluminum-containing vaccines concluded that while their “findings do not constitute strong evidence for questioning the safety of aluminum in vaccines…additional examination of this hypothesis appears warranted.”
While VSD and other scientists should continue to do observational studies, we should also conduct randomized placebo-controlled vaccine trials, as RFK has advocated. Since we have herd immunity for many diseases, such as measles, trials can be ethically conducted by randomizing the age of vaccination to, for example, one versus three years old, while spreading the trial over a large geographical area so that the unvaccinated are not all living close to each other.
I am confident that most vaccines will continue to be found safe and effective. While some problems may be found, that is more likely to increase rather than decrease vaccine confidence. For instance, it was found that the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine causes excess febrile seizures in 12- to 23-month-old children. MMRV is now only given as a second dose to older children, while the younger kids get separate MMR and varicella vaccines, resulting in fewer vaccine-induced seizures that scare parents. Although safety studies were inconclusive, it was also wise to remove mercury from vaccines. Even if we end up with fewer vaccines in the recommended vaccine schedule, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Scandinavia has a very healthy population with fewer vaccines in their schedules.
We won’t restore vaccine confidence by preaching to the choir. After the Covid debacle, Kennedy’s stated goal is to return to evidence-based medicine free from conflicts of interest. Letting him do that is the only way that skeptics will trust vaccines again, and those of us who trust vaccines have no reason to be afraid of that.
Attempts by the public health and pharma establishments to derail the nominations of RFK, Bhattacharya, and Makary are the surest way to further increase vaccine hesitancy in America. The choice is stark. We cannot let lopsided “pro-vaccine scientists” who clamp their hands over their ears at the mildest questions do any more harm to vaccine confidence. As a pro-vaccine scientist, and in fact, the only person ever being fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine, the choice is clear in my mind. To restore vaccine confidence to previous levels, we must support the nominations of Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary.
Martin Kulldorff is an epidemiologist and biostatistician. He is Professor of Medicine at Harvard University (on leave) and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on infectious disease outbreaks and the monitoring of vaccine and drug safety, for which he has developed the free SaTScan, TreeScan, and RSequential software. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.
