Brownstone Institute
Trump Takes Over and Implements Communication Freeze at HHS, CDC, and NIH
From the Brownstone Institute
Part of the sweep of government in the first days of the Trump administration has been a freeze on communications. The explosion has hit the whole of public health bureaucracies, which Trump personally blames in part for the meltdown of his previous term of president in his last year. The pause in operations is designed to figure out exactly what is going on.
It is certainly not the case that Donald Trump wants you to die, contrary to Paul Krugman’s claim. No longer writing at the New York Times, he reserved his rather extreme view for his Substack account.
Recall that Krugman was 100 percent for lockdowns and all the rest including the fake science behind vaccine mandates. While most of the world was in cages, he was proclaiming the dawn of the great reset. With that reversed, he has reverted to form.
What actually seems to be dying the death is the public health bureaucracy.
As the Wall Street Journal explained in their story headlined “Swaths of U.S. Government Grind to a Halt After Trump Shock Therapy:” “While glitches aren’t uncommon during the early days of presidential transitions, some longtime federal employees said the chaos seemed more extreme this week due in part to wide-spanning differences between the agendas of the previous administration and the new one. The stalled initiatives extended far beyond Trump’s cancellation of federal DEI programs.”
I seriously doubt that public opinion registers much concern.
Let’s take a look at the actions of these agencies in the pre-inauguration days before the freeze.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced on January 17, three days before the inauguration, a jaw-dropping $590 million grant to Moderna, a driving force behind global vaccination with mRNA shots during Covid. The announcement of this grant changed the fortunes of the company’s stock price, which had been in a two-year slide.
The timing alone cries out for explanation. Was this to dump largess on the deep-state partner before Trump could stop it? Or was it tacitly approved by the incoming administration in order to keep Trump’s fingerprints from it? We’ll know based on whether this goes ahead. It will certainly be a test of the agency’s future under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., provided he is confirmed by the Senate.
For now, it has all the earmarks of an old regime grabbing whatever it can on the way out.
Over at the CDC, which exists as part of a suite of agencies under the control of HHS, we have one last communication dating also from January 17. It was to announce the “first-ever National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States.”
David Bell at Brownstone has been writing about this for longer than a year. As he describes it:
“Those pushing it envision a world in which any lifeform is considered intrinsically equal worth to others. If you must choose between your daughter and a rat, the choice should weigh the probability of survival of each, or may do the least harm to other lifeforms after being saved. Within this ‘equitable’ worldview, humans become a pollutant. Ever-growing human populations have driven other species to extinction through environmental change, from the megafauna of ancient Australasia to the plummeting insect populations of modern Europe. Humans become a plague upon the earth, and their restriction, impoverishment, and death may therefore be justified for a greater good.”
The connection here to Fauci et al, and their view concerning spillover diseases from animals to humans – a major reason why they were so insistent on the zoonotic origins of Covid – is rather obvious.
In the middle of the worst part of US lockdowns, Fauci and his co-author David Morens wrote an article for Cell in which they explain that the real problem with life on earth began 12,000 years ago when “human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops. These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature.”
It’s always with the same theme. If there were fewer of us, had we never had much contact with each other, if we never dared to cultivate crops, domestic animals, store water, and move around, we could have been spared all diseases.
The real problem is what we call civilization itself, which is why the article ends with an assault on “overcrowding in dwellings and places of human congregation (sports venues, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement,” all of which “catalyzes disease spread.”
The only solution, in this view, is “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
One Health, as newly embraced by the CDC, amounts to a radical transformation of the basis of social order itself, under the guidance of god-like scientists who alone know how to structure the best life for all living things, even if that comes at the expense of human flourishing.
David Bell describes this creepy strain of belief as a “cult” but it might also be described as an ideology very different from the dominant ones in the 20th century. Socialism might have proven unworkable but at least it aspired to the improvement of human life. Capitalist ideology was the same. This is something different, with more in common with the far-flung imaginings of Rousseau or the Prophet Mani who shared in common the belief that all attempts to create what we call civilization are inherently corrupting of our perfect state of nature.
This was part of the underlying philosophical infrastructure of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, not merely a public health establishment doing crazy things that happened to be captured by high-powered industrial interests. There was a dreamy and ultimately ghastly utopianism backing all of these actions, stemming from hot-house salons of government-funded science cabals where they not only refuse to speak to normal people; they have nothing but disdain for the aspirations of the common folk and their attachments to property, family, and tradition (which includes, for example, home remedies on dealing with infectious disease).
How it came to be that our main engines of public health came to be captured in whole by such a crazed ideology would require a deep and expansive investigation. Certainly, it happened gradually and largely out of the public eye, so much so that even our best investigative writers are still trying to wrap their brains around it all. Whatever this ideology is, it captured nearly the entire planet Earth in the years 2020-2023 or thereabouts and resulted in a health crisis without precedent in modern times.
Part of the result of that grand experiment was the unseating of a variety of populist leaders in the US, UK, and Brazil. This seems to have set in motion what Walter Kirn has called “a coup against a coup,” as the astonishing avalanche of executive orders reveals. The flurry of news – including a full reaffirmation of free speech, a purge of all DEI edicts, a deletion of previous dictates on Central Bank Digital Currencies, and a full hiring freeze in the federal government – has been so massive that the pundit class has been left gasping to stay on top of it all.
As for NIH, Jay Bhattacharya has been tagged to head the agency. As he awaits Senate confirmation, the acting head is Dr. Matthew Memoli, an award-winning vaccinologist who has worked at NIH for 16 years. In defiance of the regime, he argued in 2021 that “with existing vaccines, blanket vaccination of people at low risk of severe illness could hamper the development of more-robust immunity gained across a population from infection.”
Our own Fellow Bret Swanson took note of this one dissident within the Fauci ranks and celebrated his resolve to speak truth to power, in a complete takedown of evil four years ago. The doctor came under fire for daring to disagree.
Now Dr. Memoli heads the agency he defied. He remains in that position until the man once called a “fringe epidemiologist” by the previous head of NIH takes full control. This is as close to revolution and counterrevolution as you will find in a democratic society.
Something big and potentially wonderful is happening in the realm of public health, which was deployed for egregious purposes only a few years ago. It is a turning point of some sort, and one can hope that the results are consistent with the health, well-being, and freedom of everyone.
For now, there doesn’t seem to be too much in the way of public panic about the big freeze at HHS-related agencies, much less the removal of Anthony Fauci’s expensive security detail.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
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
From the Brownstone Institute
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 soared 40 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.
Republished from RealClearHealth
Author
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