From The DisInformation Chronicle

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.”

Give a gift subscription

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.”

“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.

From the Brownstone Institute

By Alex Washburne 

Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.

While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:

Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.

In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.

It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.

Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.

It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.

Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.

Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.

What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?

It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.

I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.

The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.

To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.

It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.

In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.

The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.

With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.

A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Alex Washburne

Alex Washburne is a mathematical biologist and the founder and chief scientist at Selva Analytics. He studies competition in ecological, epidemiological, and economic systems research, with research on covid epidemiology, the economic impacts of pandemic policy, and stock market response to epidemiological news.