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.”

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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.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Mariane Angela

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield appeared Wednesday on Newsmax to discuss Dr. Anthony Fauci’s preemptive pardon by former President Joe Biden.

“I hope that it gives Fauci an opportunity to try to be more honest and transparent about the decisions that he made and what he did. I’m not confident that that’s going to happen,” Redfield said during an appearance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight.”

“You know, I also think it’s odd for Biden to pardon him prospectively when he hasn’t been accused of any direct crime. I know if I was in that position that I wouldn’t like that because it does imply that I actually did something wrong.”

Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield appeared Wednesday on Newsmax to discuss Dr. Anthony Fauci’s preemptive pardon

Redfield also talked about events portrayed in the 2023 film “Oppenheimer.”

The former director said he hopes — similar to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s eventual realization of his impact on global warfare — Fauci might come to terms with the ramifications of his decisions before and during the pandemic.

“You know, when I watched the ‘Oppenheimer’ movie and I watched the scenes when Oppenheimer finally realized what happened with the science that he gave to the world, particularly when President Truman decided to use the atomic bomb a second time, and he realized that he had opened up really a big problem in terms of giving science to create a weapon that could kill hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t know if Tony realizes, and he’s very sensitive to this issue,” Redfield said when asked if Fauci recognized his responsibility.

Redfield said he wonders whether Fauci acknowledges the full extent of his actions, particularly what Redfield said was Fauci’s role in funding gain-of-function research.

“I do think Tony did mislead the nation, and he did mislead the Congress. He did make some bad decisions when it came to funding the research and gain-of-function research in China,” Redfield said.

Redfield said he hopes Fauci would act transparent and accountable in his actions.

“I think it’s really important. If one good thing comes from this is we get a moratorium on gain-of-function research. I do hope Tony takes advantage of this opportunity to basically be more transparent and let people understand why he made the decisions he did and also admit some accountability for the negative consequences of those decisions,” Redfield said, adding “that [that] science should not have been done.”

During the last hours of his presidency on Monday, Biden issued preemptive pardons to Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and the members of the Jan. 6 committee and said that they should not be subjected to “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.” The pardon spans back to 2014, encompassing Fauci’s role on the White House Coronavirus Task Force and his position as the chief medical advisor to Biden.

Accusations against Fauci include lying to Congress and circumventing requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Fauci has consistently described COVID-19 as a “natural occurrence” and denied any link between his agency’s subawards to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the virus. Several experts have accused Fauci of committing perjury during his congressional testimonies, particularly in his denials that the viruses he supported could have evolved into COVID-19.