COVID-19
House COVID Committee Confirms What We Have Long Suspected — The Feds Really Hate Transparency

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Last week details emerged from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, confirming what government transparency advocates long suspected: Federal bureaucrats are purposefully stonewalling the American people’s right to know about their government.
Republican Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who chairs the full House Oversight and Accountability Committee, read from an email that Dr. David Morens, a top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci, sent claiming that a staffer inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had shown him how to erase records requested by the public.
He was corresponding with Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that used tax dollars to fund controversial gain-of-function research in Wuhan, where the COVID outbreak began. The Department of Health and Human Services has since suspended funding of EcoHealth Alliance.
Morens wrote: “I learned from our FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) 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.”
The implications for government transparency are enormous. How often do NIH staffers conceal what they do with our tax dollars? Why did a FOIA officer feel empowered to assist subjects of FOIA requests? How else do FOIA offers interfere with these requests? Has this behavior spread to the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies?
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com can speak to the problem. We have spent years — and gone to court — to force NIH to reveal the royalties paid to government scientists through medical innovation licensing.
When Americans are considering a drug or therapeutic recommended by public health officials, they deserve to understand all the financial stakes at play. Were any decision makers receiving payments? Were they continuing more lucrative research at the expense of other public health solutions?
For many, the question looming largest has been whether the relentless COVID vaccine push was driven by a potential windfall for NIH and certain scientists there.
When we first filed a FOIA, the agency ignored us and then refused to release the information.
After suing, NIH was required to release the information and began doing so incrementally due to the high volume of data. Tallied from 2009 through 2020, it amounted to an enormous sum–over $325 million paid by private companies to NIH and its scientists over 56,000 transactions.
Previously, we’d also discovered that Dr. Fauci, the face of the nation’s COVID response, was the highest compensated bureaucrat in the country. He out-earned President Biden. He out-earned his own boss, then-Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak.
Along with Fauci, who scoffed at concerns about royalty payments, Tabak faced questions from Congress.
In a March 2023 budget hearing, Rep. John Moolenaar told Tabak an obvious truth: every single, secret royalty payment represents a potential conflict of interest.
“To me, one of the biggest concerns people had during this last couple years is: Were they getting truthful information from their government? Could they trust what people were saying about the medicines? To me, that creates a very disturbing appearance.”
“The idea that people were getting a financial benefit from certain research that was done and grants that were awarded, that to me is the height of the appearance of a conflict of interest,” Moolenaar concluded.
The lawmaker urged NIH to make the money trail more transparent.
It was Tabak in the hot seat again last week, as Comer recited Morens’ outrageous email message.
Was the behavior he described consistent with NIH policy, Comer asked? “It is not,” Tabak responded flatly.
Did the FOIA team at NIH help its colleagues avoid transparency? “I certainly hope not,” Tabak offered.
Hope doesn’t suffice in this situation. It demands that lawmakers strengthen transparency law, update it for the 21st century and create some consequences for bad actors.
There are a few primary ways bureaucrats and decisionmakers violate the spirit of the law.
First, they overuse a series of exemptions designed to protect national security secrets or privacy laws. Too much is omitted through these exceptions; the American people deserve the full truth.
When documents are produced, they’re too often rendered useless through excessive redactions. We’re still fighting in real time to get more pieces of the royalty puzzle revealed.
Next, unreasonable delays are blamed on staffing levels, while many FOIA-related roles sit open. Agencies must prioritize filling those seats and Congress should appropriate more of them as needed.
Finally, we have the behavior Morens describes. A post facto effort to simply abscond with the information. It’s not just a policy violation but an affront to the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act. What consequences do these staffers ever truly face?
Until we get serious about protecting transparency, “FOIA lady” will be a duly anonymous symbol of what many have suspected: government employees hustling to cover their tracks.
Adam Andrzejewski is founder & CEO of OpenTheBooks.com, the nation’s largest private database of public spending.
Freedom Convoy
Court Orders Bank Freezing Records in Freedom Convoy Case

A Canadian court has ordered the release of documents that could shed light on how federal authorities and law enforcement worked together to freeze the bank accounts of a protester involved in the Freedom Convoy.
Both the RCMP and TD Bank are now required to provide records related to Evan Blackman, who took part in the 2022 demonstrations and had his accounts frozen despite not being convicted of any crime at the time.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) announced the Ontario Court of Justice ruling. The organization is representing Blackman, whose legal team argues that the actions taken against him amounted to a serious abuse of power.
“The freezing of Mr. Blackman’s bank accounts was an extreme overreach on the part of the police and the federal government,” said his lawyer, Chris Fleury. “These records will hopefully reveal exactly how and why Mr. Blackman’s accounts [were] frozen.”
Blackman was arrested during the mass protests in Ottawa, which drew thousands of Canadians opposed to vaccine mandates and other pandemic-era restrictions.
Although he faced charges of mischief and obstructing police, those charges were dismissed in October due to a lack of evidence. Despite this, prosecutors have appealed, and a trial is set to begin on August 14.
At the height of the protests, TD Bank froze three of Blackman’s accounts following government orders issued under the Emergencies Act. Then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had invoked the act to grant his government broad powers to disrupt the protest movement, including the unprecedented use of financial institutions to penalize individuals for their support or participation.
In 2024, a Federal Court Justice ruled that Trudeau’s decision to invoke the act had not been justified.
Blackman’s legal team plans to use the newly released records to demonstrate the extent of government intrusion into personal freedoms.
According to the JCCF, this case may be the first in Canada where a criminal trial includes a Charter challenge over the freezing of personal bank accounts under emergency legislation.
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COVID-19
FDA requires new warning on mRNA COVID shots due to heart damage in young men

From LifeSiteNews
Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID shots must now include warnings that they cause ‘extremely high risk’ of heart inflammation and irreversible damage in males up to age 24.
The Trump administration’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it will now require updated safety warnings on mRNA COVID-19 shots to include the “extremely high risk” of myocarditis/pericarditis and the likelihood of long-term, irreversible heart damage for teen boys and young men up to age 24.
The required safety updates apply to Comirnaty, the mRNA COVID shot manufactured by Pfizer Inc., and Spikevax, the mRNA COVID shot manufactured ModernaTX, Inc.
According to a press release, the FDA now requires each of those manufacturers to update the warning about the risks of myocarditis and pericarditis to include information about:
- the estimated unadjusted incidence of myocarditis and/or pericarditis following administration of the 2023-2024 Formula of mRNA COVID-19 shots and
- the results of a study that collected information on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cardiac MRI) in people who developed myocarditis after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 injection.
The FDA has also required the manufacturers to describe the new safety information in the adverse reactions section of the prescribing information and in the information for recipients and caregivers.
Additionally, the fact sheets for healthcare providers and for recipients and caregivers for Moderna COVID-19 shot and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot, which are authorized for emergency use in individuals 6 months through 11 years of age, have also been updated to include the new safety information in alignment with the Comirnaty and Spikevax prescribing information and information for recipients and caregivers.
In a video published on social media, Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, explained the alarming reasons for the warning updates.
While heart problems arose in approximately 8 out of 1 million persons ages 6 months to 64 years following reception of the cited shots, that number more than triples to 27 per million for males ages 12 to 24.
Prasad noted that multiple studies have arrived at similar findings.
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