COVID-19
Trump Team names acting NIH Director, moving out senior officials who mislead the publi
Paul D. Thacker
Trump Team Taps Dr. Matthew J. Memoli as Acting NIH Director, to Control Political Games and Push Aside Lawrence Tabak
“He took risk and stood up to Tony Fauci when no-one else on the inside of NIAID would.” – Dr Robert Malone
The Trump transition team has apparently tapped senior NIH researcher Matthew J. Memoli to serve as acting director to help calm the agency until the Senate confirms Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to run the NIH. Memoli won the NIH director’s award in 2021 for supervising a national study of undiagnosed COVID cases and runs a research team at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) formerly headed by Tony Fauci, who Biden pardoned on his last day in office for any COVID-related offenses.
NIH Director Monica M. Bertagnolli stepped down from her position last week, after the Trump transition team advised her to resign, placing Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak as the agency’s top official. The new administration and congressional leaders view Tabak as dishonest and manipulative, and NIH insiders contacted for this story complain that Tabak helped Fauci mislead the public about grants Fauci provided to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some suspect the pandemic started.
“They didn’t take action on the COVID origins question,” an official inside the NIH Director’s office said. “And there’s a continued lack of transparency.”
The Trump administration sent a memo two days ago to federal health agencies telling them to halt external communications such as issuing documents, guidance or notices, until such documents can be approved by “a presidential appointee.” While all administrations control final approval of agency communications, federal employees immediately leaked the memo to reporters at the Washington Post and NPR.
Although the memo says nothing about halting private meetings, the NIH took the extraordinary step of then shutting down private study sections that review scientific grant approvals, a move that seems designed to harass the incoming administration.
“Researchers facing ‘a lot uncertainty, fear and panic’,” reads a breathless report from Science Magazine.
“The memo doesn’t say anything about private meetings, and they shut down these study sections to scare everyone into believing [research] studies will shut down and labs will shutter,” said an NIH official in the Director’s office. “This is a manipulation tactic by the NIH Director’s office to tar the new administration: ‘This is the fascism we expected.’”
Tabak’s demotion comes after Congress and independent reporters spent years trying to uncover how the pandemic started, only to meet obfuscation and “slow rolling” from Tabak. In one example, House congressional leaders demanded NIH explain funding Fauci provided to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that was run by Peter Daszak, and which funded gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The NIH ignored Republican congressional requests for over a year. When Tabak eventually sent a response to Congress on October 20, 2021, he simultaneously leaked the letter to friendly science writers at the New York Times. The letter noted that EcoHealth had failed to report data and research as required by the NIH grant.
“It’s all smoke and mirrors with them at the NIH,” said a congressional investigator. “And then they get friendly media to carry their water.”
Congress sent the NIH a letter a month later demanding NIH explain changes they secretly made to an NIH webpage on October 20, 2021, the day before Tabak admitted that EcoHealth Alliance was out of compliance with NIH grant regulations. The webpage provided the definition for “gain of function research.” However, the NIH had changed the definiton to make it appear EcoHealth Alliance had not performed gain of function research.
Tabak’s name came up again in August last year when reporter Jimmy Tobias released a tranche of NIH emails he got from a public records request. Emails showed Tabak and other NIH officials conspiring to avoid answering questions about EcoHealth Alliance early in the pandemic, from the chairs of several House committees.
“We are going to draft a response to the letter that doesn’t actually answer the questions in the letter but rather presents a narrative of what happened at a high level…” wrote NIH associate director for legislative policy, Adrienne Hallett, in a July 2020 email. Copied in on the exchange is Lawrence Tabak. “The Committee may come back for other documents but I’m hoping to run out the clock.”
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“Sounds like a good plan,” responded Francis Collins, then director of the NIH.
“Thanks so much Adrienne!” replied Michael Lauer, the NIH’s deputy director of extramural research. “I’ll draft something today.”
In the Biden administration’s final week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) finally debarred EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak “to protect the Federal Government’s business interests” after congressional investigators uncovered NIH wrongdoing.
Acting Director Memoli
While in his role as Acting Director, Memoli will likely continue his studies of respiratory viruses and their vaccines. In late 2021, Memoli led a debate inside the NIH on the ethics of the COVID vaccine mandates, putting him at odds with Fauci, who promoted the vaccines for the White House during a time when the media denigrated any COVID vaccine critic as an “anti-vaxxer.”
“I do vaccine trials. I, in fact, help create vaccines,” Memoli told the Wall Street Journal in 2021. Memoli said blanket vaccinations of people at low risk of severe disease with the COVID vaccines could hamper the development of more-robust population immunity from acquired infection. However, he supported COVID vaccination in the elderly, obese, and other high-risk. “Part of my career is to share my expert opinions, right or wrong.…I mean, if they all end up saying I’m wrong, that’s fine. I want to have the discussion.”
Trump transition team members say they may be replacing other senior NIH officials, such as Renate Myles, who runs the agency’s communications department and coordinates activities across all the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers. Myles is known in the NIH Director’s office as a loyal foot soldier to Fauci and someone who helped to spread the media myth that it was a “conspiracy theory” to question if the pandemic started in Wuhan lab that Fauci funded.
“They politicized the issue but then attributed the politicization to Republicans or anyone who questioned them—anyone but themselves,” said the NIH official.
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From LifeSiteNews
Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich said she is “disappointed” in the Canadian “justice system” that her and convoy co-leader Chris Barber’s verdict for their mischief trial, which supposed to have been released in two weeks, has now been delayed to an unknown date.
In a X post late Thursday, Lich shared the news with her followers, noting, “We just received news that our March 12th verdict date is unfortunately being postponed.”
“At the end of our criminal (longest) mischief trial last August, when Her Honour set the verdict date, she let us know the court system assigned her a full trial schedule to help clear the backlog from the Covid years,” wrote Lich.
“This is the sad state of the justice system in Canada. While we are disappointed in yet another delay in our case, we know the importance of the upcoming decision not just for us, but for all Canadians.”
Lich said that as soon as she is told when the new verdict date will be, she will let everyone know.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Lich and Barber’s verdict was supposed to have been announced on March 12.
They both face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews reported extensively on their trial.
Lich and Barber’s trial concluded back in September of 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.
Last week, Lich shared a heartwarming letter she received from a child, who told her to “keep fighting” for everyone and that “God will protect” her from the “enemy.”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Lich recently spelled out how much the Canadian government has spent prosecuting her and Barber for their role in the protests. She said at least $5 million in “taxpayer dollars” has been spent thus far, with her and Barber’s legal costs being above $750,000.
Lich was arrested on February 17, 2022, in Ottawa. Barber was arrested the same day.
In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government enacted the never-before-used Emergencies Act (EA) on February 14, 2022.
During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister.
Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23.
The EA controversially allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters, conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies the government deemed illegal.
From LifeSiteNews
For his first major action since taking office just two weeks ago, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has issued a 90-day stop-work order to American biotech company Vaxart Inc., which had been contracted during the Biden administration to develop a new “oral COVID-19 vaccine.”
Kennedy’s order came just as 10,000 individuals were scheduled to begin clinical trials on Monday.
HHS will utilize the 90-day hiatus to review Vaxart’s initial findings to determine the future of the human trials and continued drug development.
Approximately $460 million had been allotted to Vaxart by HHS to develop its new COVID-19 “vaccine,” of which $240 million had been authorized for the preliminary study, according to a report by Fox News Digital, which broke the story.
“While it is crucial that the Department [of] Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production, including Vaxart’s,” Kennedy told Fox News Digital.
“I look forward to working with Vaxart and medical experts to ensure this work produces safe, effective, and fiscal-minded vaccine technology,” added Kennedy.
“If anyone was worried that RFK would not address vaccine damage, this is proof he’s only getting started,” declared the producers of the 2022 Died Suddenly film, which questioned the motives behind the development and mandating of the first round of COVID-19 shots and the startling number of deaths attributed to them.
There appears to be plenty of justification for pausing and even terminating Vaxart’s continued development of its “oral COVID-19 vaccine”
According to a report by The Defender’s John-Michael Dumais and published by LifeSiteNews in June, “Vaxart’s pill, VXA-CoV2-1, uses an adenovirus vector to infect epithelial cells in the lower small intestine. The vaccine delivers the genetic material to create the spike protein. The company boasts that a special coating allows the oral pill to survive the low pH in the stomach.”
“Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) and AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines also used adenovirus vectors,” noted Dumais, who explained:
The use of J&J’s vaccine was paused in April 2021 due to reports of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a severe blood clotting disorder. In July 2021, the FDA warned about the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome with the J&J vaccine after approximately 100 cases were reported among 12.8 million vaccine recipients. With existing doses of the J&J vaccine having expired in May 2023, the vaccine is no longer in use.
AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine also caused blood clots, resulting in temporary pauses in its use in several countries. With declining demand, it was also removed from the market in May 2023.
Vaxart’s oral COVID-19 development project is part of the Biden administration’s $4.7 billion Project NextGen initiative, launched in 2023 to accelerate the development of new COVID “vaccines.”
Vaxart’s “vaccine” was funded through a contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which falls under the umbrella of HHS’s Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.
The pausing of Vaxart’s COVID-19 “vaccine” development can be seen as Kennedy’s first important move to fulfill his stated mission as HHS secretary.
Shortly after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled Establishing The President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA EO) to investigate and address the root causes of America’s escalating health crisis.
Chaired by Kennedy, the commission has four main policy directives to reverse chronic disease: Empower Americans through transparency and open-source data and avoid conflicts of interest in all federally funded health research; prioritize gold-standard research on why Americans are getting sick in all health-related research funded by the federal government; work with farmers to ensure that U.S. food is the healthy, abundant, and affordable; and ensure expanded treatment options and health coverage flexibility for beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention.
The MAHA EO came at a time when many Americans have lost trust in the nation’s healthcare system and are increasingly skeptical as to whether they are receiving honest answers about the causes of the country’s health crisis and how to improve it.
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