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COVID-19

Trump Team names acting NIH Director, moving out senior officials who mislead the publi

Published

2 months ago

9 minute read

From The DisInformation Chronicle

Paul D. Thacker 

Investigative Reporter; Former Investigator United States Senate; Former Fellow Safra Ethics Center, Harvard University

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.”

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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.

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Maxime Bernier slams Freedom Convoy leaders’ guilty verdict, calls Canada’s justice system ‘corrupt’

Published on April 5, 2025

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The leader of the People’s Party of Canada says Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were victims of a ‘political witch hunt.’

The leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) ripped Thursday’s federal court ruling that found Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber guilty of mischief, saying the court siding with the government amounted to a “political witch hunt.”

“It is disheartening to learn that two of the heroes of the Freedom Convoy, @LichTamara and @ChrisBarber1975, have been found guilty of mischief in the longest and one of the costliest trials in Canadian history,” Maxime Bernier wrote Thursday on X.

“This clearly was a political witch hunt.”

Bernier added that in his view the reality is that Canada’s justice system is “corrupt.”

“Trudeau and his ministers who illegally invoked the Emergencies Act and violated basic rights will go unpunished,” he noted.

“Our justice system is corrupt to the bones.”

On Thursday, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey, the federal judge overseeing the mischief trial, delivered her verdict, finding both Lich and Barber guilty of mischief.

Perkins-McVey seemed to agree with the Crown’s case that Lich and Barber’s influence on the Freedom Convoy constituted public mischief but did dismiss the Crown’s Carter Application accusing Lich and Barber of conspiracy outright.

Lich and Barber both faced six charges each, those being charges of mischief, obstruction, intimidation, and counseling others to commit mischief and intimidation. After the court reconvened Thursday afternoon, Lich was acquitted of four of her six charges, with the fifth charge, counseling to commit mischief, being stayed by the judge.

As for sentencing, the court will reconvene on April 16 at 1:30 p.m. EST, at which time it will say when a date and time for sentencing will be held.

Lich and Barber both face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on their trial.

The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.

Lich and Barber were arrested on February 17, 2022, in Ottawa for their roles in leading the popular Freedom Convoy protest against COVID mandates. During COVID, Canadians were subjected to vaccine mandates, mask mandates, extensive lockdowns and even the closure of churches.

Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.” During the clear-out, an elderly lady was trampled by a police horse and many who donated to the cause had their bank accounts frozen.

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COVID-19

Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

Published on April 3, 2025

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By Doug Mainwaring

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.

Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.

The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.

A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.

MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.

However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.

For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.

Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.

“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.

“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.

Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.

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