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minority opinion of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions Minority Oversight Staff, which has been archived at the Malone Institute under the government corruption tab, and can be found here.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.
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.
Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.
It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.
People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.
Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.
I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.
The EU Reverses Its Focus
When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.
Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.
We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.
In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”
The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.
As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?
Europe’s Need for Outside Help
A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.
Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.
Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.
Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.
There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
