Tag Archive for: Anthony Fauci

Doc Who Revived Zombie Virus From Frozen Corpse Now Has Keys To Fauci’s Old Agency

/in , , , , , , /by

The new head of Anthony Fauci’s former institute has accrued an extraordinary amount of research money and power in recent weeks despite a long career conducting just the sort of high-risk virology that President Donald Trump’s health leaders have vowed to stamp out.

Virologist Jeffery Taubenberger, a longtime Fauci ally who for more than a decade has defended the practice of enhancing viruses known as gain-of-function (GOF) virology, ascended to the top of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) on April 24. His bosses, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya, oppose GOF as potentially catastrophic.

One week after Taubenberger became head of NIAID, HHS announced May 1 that it would make a half a billion-dollar investment in a vaccine technology co-invented by Taubenberger. Taubenberger could receive royalty payments and lab investments should the taxpayer-funded bet on the vaccine technology prove successful, according to government watchdog Open the Books (OTB).

Taubenberger’s rise to the top of the second largest subagency at Bhattacharya’s NIH follows a career marked by headline-grabbing GOF research.

Taubenberger’s most famous experiments involved what his lab’s website refers to as “archaevirology”— reviving the 1918 Spanish flu that killed up to 100 million people from a body preserved in permafrost. Taubenberger has also participated in experiments to splice genes from 1918 flu with contemporary H1N1 viruses. Critics like Kennedy and Bhattacharya say gain-of-function experiments like these have no public health benefit.

Taubenberger did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

‘The Complaining Crowd’

As the virologist behind some of the most famous GOF experiments in history, Taubenberger worked with Fauci to advocate for the discipline against the concerns from other scientists about lab-born pandemics, emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show.

“The complaining crowd”: That’s how Taubenberger referred in a May 2020 email to people concerned about one of the earliest and most hotly debated GOF experiments — the creation of an airborne H5N1 avian influenza virus. The World Health Organization estimates the fatality rate of H5N1 to be roughly 50%.

Taubenberger’s elevation to NIAID director shows the practical challenges of “draining the swamp.” Kennedy and Bhattacharya, despite ambitions for upheaval, face an entrenched Washington bureaucracy.

Taubenberger’s leadership of the $6.6 billion institute is temporary, but it comes at a sensitive moment.

As the head of NIAID, the agency that underwrites most federally-funded GOF, Taubenberger is well-positioned to influence new regulations. His leadership coincides with a 120-day sprint to ban “dangerous gain-of-function research.” Trump signed an executive order on May 6 that started the clock on a four-month process to hammer out the precise language.

“I was very disappointed by the appointment of Jeffrey Taubenberger as head of NIAID,” Laura Kahn, a pandemic expert and coauthor of the book “One Health and the Politics of COVID-19,” told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Given Taubenberger’s research history, his appointment suggests that such work will continue to be supported by NIAID despite Trump’s executive order. Have we learned nothing from COVID-19?”

Taubenberger’s reconstruction of the 1918 influenza virus “sent a terrible message to China and Russia that dangerous GOF work was acceptable,” Kahn said.

In contrast, virologists who support GOF have praised the pick.

“He’s a senior scientist at NIH and a collaborator of Matthew Memoli who was acting NIH director … Huge plus that the lab leak conspiracists over on X are so upset about it,” wrote University of Sydney virologist Eddie Holmes on BlueSky. Holmes is a collaborator of Taubenberger and one of the virologists who aided Fauci in downplaying a possible lab origin of COVID in 2020.

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, Taubenberger worked with Fauci’s disgraced senior scientific adviser David Morens to defend the researchers who had conducted GOF research in Wuhan. He and Morens coauthored a July 2020 scientific paper arguing that “theories about a hypothetical man-made origin” of the coronavirus “have been thoroughly discredited.”

The article published at an opportune time for Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator Peter Daszak, whose organization EcoHealth Alliance faced the possible clawback of NIH funding if it couldn’t produce critical data about its coronavirus research in China. Morens described the article as one that “defends Peter and his Chinese colleagues.”

Sure enough, Daszak received a new $7.5 million grant from NIAID by August 2020 even without turning over information from Wuhan.

Morens later faced bipartisan criticism in 2024 for emails exposing his attempts to evade the Freedom of Information Act in his communications with Daszak, a longtime friend. Morens said that he would “delete any smoking guns.”

With help from officials within NIH like Taubenberger, Daszak stalled the suspension of his NIH funding. It was roughly four years later, after a congressional investigation, that EcoHealth and Daszak faced a federal funding suspension and, eventually, debarment.

‘Nature Is The Ultimate Bioterrorist’

Taubenberger’s public statements on GOF research — while more measured than the private communications mocking people with concerns — contrasts starkly with that of his bosses.

“In considering the threat of bioterrorism or accidental release of genetically engineered viruses, it is worth remembering that nature is the ultimate bioterrorist,” reads Taubenberger’s 2012 article defending the avian influenza experiment.

That position directly contradicts comments Bhattacharya gave on May 7 in a television interview citing that work as emblematic of the GOF the NIH plans to fetter out.

“That avian influenza work, I think it was in 2010 or 2011, and it led President Obama to actually put a freeze on all gain-of-function work which President Obama lifted almost on his last day in office in 2017,” Bhattacharya said in an interview with Newsmax. “Anything that puts the American people at risk like this is not something we at the NIH should be doing.”

Kennedy too was critical of that experiment in his 2023 book “The Wuhan Cover-Up And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race.”

Morens grumbled in an April 2020 email that he and Taubenberger had defended GOF research before against “Ludditism.”

“I am sure both of you remember the GOF attacks of a decade ago,” he said. “tony, me, Jeff Taubenberger, and many others here had to do battle with a lot of craziness. … It was much less [sic] about science than [it] was about Ludditism.”

In a separate May 2020 email, Morens reiterates the important role that he and Taubenberger played in advocating for GOF and combating the concerns of scientists at Stanford University, Harvard University and Rutgers University, which he described as “demagoguery.”

“As Tony’s scientific advisor, i spent much of the year, along with Jeff T, helping brief him and get him up to speed,” he said.

‘Leopard That Hasn’t Changed Its Spots’

The COVID-19 pandemic did not appear to dampen Taubenberger’s enthusiasm for GOF research. Taubenberger said in a December 2022 podcast interview with another prominent advocate for GOF virology that he aspired to revive other pre-1918 pandemic viruses through “archival tissues” from human autopsies, including viruses that caused pandemics in the Middle Ages.

“With the newer molecular techniques, I’ve consistently remained hopeful that someday the magic tissue sample will be found,” Taubenberger said.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy all have intelligence pointing to a lab origin of COVID-19.

Taubenberger’s support of GOF research three years after COVID-19 emerged is troubling, according to Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine.

“Any leopard that hasn’t changed its spots already in the light of SARS-CoV-2, I’m skeptical will change its spots now,” Noymer said to DCNF. “I’m all for road to Damascus conversions, but if you can be pro-gain of function in December 2022, then it seems to me you’re a dyed in the wool pro-gain-of-function person and therefore not the right choice to implement the recent executive order.”

Vaccine ‘Gold’

Within a week of Taubenberger taking the reins at NIAID, he started ruffling feathers.

HHS will devote massive departmental resources toward the development of a flu vaccine platform co-owned by Taubenberger in the hopes it will provide broad protection against multiple strains of pandemic-capable flu viruses, the department announced earlier this month.

HHS has dubbed the initiative “Generation Gold Standard.”

The money has been rejiggered from a $5 billion investment by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and NIAID in next generation COVID-19 vaccines announced in 2023.

The vaccine prototypes — blandly named “BPL-1357” and “BPL-24910” — are BPL-inactivated whole-virus vaccines, a technology that has been in use since the 1950s. “BPL” stands for beta-propiolactone, a chemical used in vaccines to inactivate viruses, destroying their infectivity while retaining their ability to provoke an immune response.

Taubenberger holds two patents titled “Broadly Protective Inactivated Influenza Virus Vaccine.”

The new investment builds on the research of Taubenberger and his longtime collaborator Matthew J. Memoli, Bhattacharya’s principal deputy.

HHS said in its statement announcing Generation Gold Standard that the investment has “freedom from commercial conflicts of interest.”

But there’s another apparent conflict of interest: Should the vaccine prove safe and effective, Taubenberger could earn up to $150,000 annually and additional funds for his lab, per an investigation into NIH royalty payment rules by OTB.

NIH insists firewalls prevent the undue influence of patent holders on grant-making decisions but with few specifics. Then-NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak could not precisely describe the firewalls when pressed by congressional Republicans in May 2022, according to an August 2023 OTB investigation.

Some scientists criticize the surge in HHS resources toward a decades-old technology, according to press reports.

The investment is a major career milestone for Taubenberger, a Fauci-aligned expert who has not only survived but thrived in a department now led by self-declared “renegades” like Kennedy.

The success comes despite a career and declared worldview starkly at odds with the renegade ethos of his bosses.

“My wife bought me a mug that says ‘my medical degree is worth more than your Google search,’” Taubenberger said in the 2022 podcast interview.

AUTHOR

Emily Kopp

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump’s Gain-Of-Function Research Crackdown Turns Out To Be Narrower Than Expected

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Public Health Tyrants Need to Be Quarantined

/in , , , , /by

I’m going to keep pounding away at the fact our public health authorities were wrong about everything regarding COVID.  I’m doing so because they assumed an awful lot of power over our lives and ultimately proved to be destructive.  This should never be allowed to happen again.

They were wrong about masks.  A review of 78 studies shows there is no evidence masks are effective in a pandemic.  There is also no evidence removal of mask mandates caused COVID deaths to go up.  In fact, in Kansas, counties with a mask mandate experienced significantly higher case fatality rates than counties that did not.  So, masks not only did not help, they hurt.  But what did the public health industrial complex do?  Suppress the truth, that’s what.

Public health authorities were wrong about the lab leak theory.  It remains a perfectly good theory, now found credible by the Energy Department and the FBI.  But what did Fauci do?   Government records show he dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory”, gave government grants to proponents of the theory to shut them up, and commissioned a report to publicly discredit the theory.  Fauci rules?  I don’t think so.  CNN and Facebook helped Fauci cover up the truth.

Public health officials were wrong about ivermectin.  The aggregate of studies continues to weigh in favor of ivermectin’s efficacy in COVID cases on mortality and lesser questions.  But public officials deliberately trashed ivermectin – calling it just a ‘horse de-wormer’ – and conspired to keep it from being prescribed.  A group of doctors is now suing to hold officials at the FDA and HHS accountable for their actions.  I hope all the hospitals that threw doctors out for prescribing or advocating for the use of ivermectin get sued, too.

The public health industrial complex was also wrong about the impact of COVID on kids, falsely claiming it was a leading cause of death among young people.  Accidents, drug overdoses, and drownings were far more prevalent.  The truth is only one out of a 100,000 kids and teens died from COVID.  The numbers were never high enough to justify school lockdowns and the self-inflicted ravages of learning loss from closing school doors are now common knowledge.

Public health authorities were also wrong about natural immunity, falsely claiming COVID vaccine immunity was better, as late as in March in congressional testimony.  Fauci is in this story, too, meeting in secret with other U.S. health officials, to get their story straight about how natural immunity was no good despite the scientific evidence showing it was.  Their effort was ultimately futile, though, because evidence keeps piling up that natural immunity is better.

Evidence is also piling up the vaccines were not very effective.  A recent study shows the immune system gets tired and doesn’t produce much of a response after a third dose.  Another study shows the effect of bivalent boosters wears off after two months.  These studies are in addition to the pile of other studies I mentioned in previous commentaries casting doubt on COVID vaccine efficacy.

So many lies, so many cover-ups.  We deserve better from our government officials and politicians.  They’re supposed to be working for us, not lording over us.  I, for one, will never trust them again.  But the Moral of the Story is we need to put up more of a fight when public health authorities and politicians try to steal our liberty for no good reason.  One of the very first things I read about pandemic legal theory is that public health authorities have to make their case in court before taking emergency measures.  That never happened.  They were never put to their proof under oath and cross-examination.  Let’s make sure a full examination of their argument happens the next time these political animals go off the rails.

©2023 Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

RELATED VIDEO: Katherine Watt: In Her Own Words

Sen. Rand Paul, Rep. Chip Roy To Introduce Legislation To Eliminate Fauci’s NIAID

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Texas Rep. Chip Roy will introduce legislation Thursday that would eliminate the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The Daily Caller first obtained a copy of the bill, which is titled the NIH Reform Act. The bill would specifically replace the NIAID with three separate national research institutes that would be led by directors subject to Senate confirmation and limited to no more than two 5-year terms.

The three new institutes would be the National Institute of Allergic Diseases, the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of Immunologic Diseases. The directors of each new institute would be appointed by the president, subject to Senate confirmation, and limited to no more than two 5-year terms.

“We’ve learned a lot over the past few years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator-in-chief.’ No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans,” Paul told the Daily Caller before introducing the legislation.

“To ensure that ineffective, unscientific lockdowns and mandates are never foisted on the American people ever again, I’ve introduced this bill to eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s previous position as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and divide the role into three separate new institutes. This will create accountability and oversight into a taxpayer funded position that has largely abused its power and has been responsible for many failures and misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic,” he added.

READ THE LEGISLATION HERE: 

(DAILY CALLER OBTAINED) — … by Henry Rodgers

“From the earliest days of the pandemic, unaccountable public health bureaucracies proved themselves far more adept at ruining lives than saving them. Never again should a single individual, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, wield unchecked power and influence over the lives of the American people. Breaking up Dr. Fauci’s taxpayer funded bully pulpit into three separate agencies — and requiring Senate confirmation for all their future directors — is one of many actions necessary to allow the American people to hold public health agencies accountable,” Roy, who introduced an identical House version of the bill, said in a statement.

The legislation is currently cosponsored by Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Indiana Sen. Mike Braun and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

 

AUTHOR

HENRY RODGERS

Chief national correspondent.

RELATED ARTICLES:

EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Rand Paul Demands NIH Preserve All Documents, Communications In Fauci’s Possession

Rand Paul Introduces Legislation To Repeal Federal Mask Mandate For Public Transportation

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

White House Press Corps Explodes As KJP Publicly Berates Daily Caller Reporter

/in , , , , , , , , /by

The White House press corps exploded Tuesday after press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre berated the Daily Caller’s White House correspondent Diana Glebova.

Dr. Anthony Fauci was partaking in a press briefing when he went to step away from the podium. Glebova said she had asked several times what Fauci had done to investigate the origins of the virus, prompting Jean-Pierre to step back to the podium and snap at Glebova.

“Hold on one second, we have a process here. I’m not calling on people who yell. You’re being disrespectful to your colleagues and you’re being disrespectful to our guest. I will not call on you if you yell, and also you’re taking time off the clock,” she said.

The Grio reporter April Ryan also told her she was “being disrespectful.”

Glebova tried to respond but Jean-Pierre immediately silenced her, saying she would not get into a “back and forth with you.”

Glebova then said to Jean-Pierre that she “calls on the same people all the time.”

As Jean-Pierre then tried to step away, the New York Post’s Steven Nelson tried to defend Glebova, as did Simon Ateba from Africa News Today.

“She’s asking a good question, she’s asking a very good question,” Ateba said.

“You need to call on people across the room, she has a valid question, she’s asking about the origins of COVID,” Ateba said, prompting Jean-Pierre to head back to the podium and nastily say she heard the question but would not respond.

AUTHOR

BRIANNA LYMAN

News and commentary writer. Follow Brianna on Twitter

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Fauci Claims He Had ‘Nothing to Do’ With School Closures. His Own Statements Suggest Otherwise

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent dodge on school closures is at odds with many of his own statements.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”

The line comes to mind after watching Dr. Anthony Fauci’s interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl over the weekend. In the interview, Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was asked whether it was a “mistake” for schools to remain shut down for so long during the pandemic.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’ Jon, because if I do, it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on,” Fauci explained on Sunday. “We should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that.”

Fauci is correct that there were serious “deleterious” consequences of school closures. For example, it was recently reported that the class of 2022 saw average ACT scores plummet to the lowest level in more than thirty years, and there’s no reason to believe that younger students didn’t experience similar results. Lost learning is hardly the only “deleterious” consequence, however; the decline of mental health among youths during lockdowns has also been well chronicled.

Some may see Fauci’s response as reasonable, because he’s now acknowledging the collateral damage of these policies. The problem is that Fauci is not actually conceding anything. Nobody—and I mean nobody—ever believed you could shut down schools (and society more broadly) for any meaningful amount of time and not experience some “deleterious” consequences.

But it gets worse. Fauci goes on to claim he had nothing to do with the damaging policy.

“I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I have said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip,” Fauci told Karl. “They always come back and say, ‘Fauci was responsible for closing schools.’ I had nothing to do [with it].”

Fauci may not have sat on a school board or wielded police power during the pandemic, but his claim that he bears no responsibility for school closing takes chutzpah. It’s undeniable that many schools, cities, and state governments shut down schools precisely because of what the White House’s top medical advisor was saying, and what Fauci was saying was clear.

The journalist Jordan Schachtel has a timeline of Fauci’s statements on school reopenings, and it’s worth examining.

Fauci calls for a nationwide shutdown of schools.

“The one thing I do advise and I said this in multiple hearings and multiple briefings, that right now we have to start implementing both containment and mitigation. And what was done when you close the schools is mitigation.”

The New York Times, America’s paper of record, reports that Fauci ‘gave his blessing’ to Mayor Bill DeBlasio to shut down the New York City school system.

Fauci slams Ron DeSantis after the Florida governor announced he wanted to get schools open “as soon as possible.”

“If you have a situation where you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected,” Fauci stated.

Fauci has a testy exchange with Sen. Rand Paul, who argued schools should remain open.

Fauci dismissed the idea that schools should be opened back up fully because “we don’t know everything about the virus.”

CNBC reports: Fauci then turned Paul’s own phrasing on him. “You used the word we should be ‘humble’ about what we don’t know. I think that falls under the fact that we don’t know everything about this virus, and we really had better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children,” Fauci said. “Because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China or in Europe. For example, right now children presenting with Covid-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome, very similar to Kawasaki syndrome,” Fauci said.

In August and September, Fauci was singing the same tune. Schools could open for instruction—after the virus was under control.

Fauci’s about-face did not go unnoticed. Other health researchers questioned his attempt to distance himself from school closures.

“Why is he saying he did not encourage, suggest and recommend lockdown and school closure?” asked Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. “Certainly he didn’t make the call by himself, but he used the weight of his reputation in science to advocate for these policies… .”

This is not the first time Fauci has attempted to deflect blame for school closures and lockdowns. In a July interview with Newsweek deputy editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Fauci was asked if he would recommend closing schools again, considering the amount of collateral damage the policies caused.

“First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” Fauci responded, adding that that was the purview of the CDC.

Fauci was correct that it was the proper purview of the CDC to make specific policy recommendations, not the head of NIAID, whose job was to see that his agency provided sound scientific research to the CDC. Yet this did not seem to stop the doctor from becoming essentially the official spokesman of the federal government’s public health response, conducting literally hundreds of interviews during the pandemic and posing for numerous magazine shoots. (Many public health experts I’ve spoken with say this is precisely why science became so politicized during the pandemic.)

Now that these policies are rightly being criticized for their “deleterious” consequences, Fauci—who grew quite wealthy as a result of all the media attention he received—is claiming he had “nothing to do” with the policies.

Fauci’s claims are almost too hard to believe, but they call to mind a piece of wisdom from economist Thomas Sowell.

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong,” Sowell once observed.

The pandemic shows just how right Sowell was.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.