Corruption is Everywhere > Certainly when it comes to Covid records at NIH

 

NIH adviser David Morens can’t recall if he deleted

COVID records, laughs off Fauci FOIA evasions

By 

Social Links forJosh Christenson

Published May 22, 2024

 Updated May 22, 2024, 6:42 p.m. ET

A top adviser at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19 — and used a “secret back channel” to help Dr. Anthony Fauci and a federal grantee that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, evade transparency.

NIH senior adviser Dr. David Morens improperly conducted official government business from his private email account and solicited help from the NIH’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office to dodge records requests, according to emails revealed in a memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which The Post obtained Wednesday.

“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”

The 35-page memo by subcommittee majority staff also suggests Fauci participated “in a conspiracy amongst the highest levels” of the agency to “hide” and potentially “destroy official records regarding the origins of COVID-19.”

“I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail [sic],” he emphasized again in a Nov. 18, 2021, email to EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, whose organization was suspended this month from receiving federal funds for the next three years and who was himself proposed for debarment on Wednesday.

In the most shocking exchange, on May 28, 2021, NIH’s Office of the General Counsel instructed the agency’s FOIA office to “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV,” referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 “[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote in an April 21, 2021, email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

“We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” read a June 16, 2020, email sent just two months after EcoHealth’s Wuhan grant was initially suspended.

“If i [sic] had to bet, i [sic] would guess that beneath Tony’s macho I-am-not-worried reaction he really is concerned,” Morens also wrote in an April 22, 2021, email about Fauci’s private worries over the EcoHealth grant.

On Oct. 5, 2021, in an email sent days before the NIH would acknowledge EcoHealth funded the risky virus experiments in Wuhan, Daszak leaned on Morens to have “the NIH FoIA [sic] group actually help reduce the scope and make some useful redactions” about the grant.

The 35-page memo by subcommittee majority staff also suggests Fauci, Morens’ former boss at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), participated “in a conspiracy amongst the highest levels” of the agency to “hide” and potentially “destroy official records regarding the origins of COVID-19.”

Morens appeared before the subcommittee Wednesday afternoon to testify about his boasts of destroying “smoking gun” emails about the COVID-19 pandemic, which one former grant fraud investigator told The Post had been “flagrant and intentional misconduct.”

“He has violated the ethical standards of conduct for executive branch employees and has potentially violated criminal law,” said Diane Cutler, an ex-investigator for the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the panel were united in their denunciations of Morens.

“The information contained in these 30,000 pages of emails are deeply concerning, and in my opinion reflects poorly upon Dr. Morens and the Office of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease under Dr. Fauci’s leadership and the NIH under Dr. Francis Collins,” Subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in his opening remarks.

“Dr. Fauci’s NIAID was unfortunately less pristine than so many, including the media, would have had us all believe,” he added.

Please continue reading at: Ranking member Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.)

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Covid_19 > NIH finally admits Americans funded Gain-of-Function research on Coronavirus at Wuhan

 

NIH official finally admits taxpayers funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan — after years of denials

By 

Social Links forJosh Christenson

Published May 16, 2024, 3:11 p.m. ET

It’s about time!

At long last, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Dr. Tabak,” asked Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, “did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?”

“It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” Tabak answered. “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

The response comes after more than four years of evasions from federal public health officials — including Tabak himself and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci — about the controversial research practice that modifies viruses to make them more infectious.

Tabak added that “this is research, the generic term [gain-of-function], is research that goes on in many, many labs around the country. It is not regulated. And the reason it’s not regulated is it poses no threat or harm to anybody.”

How many millions of people died from this harmless activity?

Dr. Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and co-founder of the pandemic oversight group Biosafety Now, told The Post the exchange “was two people talking past each other.”

“Tabak was engaging in the usual obfuscation and semantic manipulation that is so frustrating and pointless,” Nickels said, adding that the NIH bigwig was resisting accountability for risky research that can create pathogens of pandemic potential.

“Instead of addressing this directly, Tabak launched into a useless response about how ‘gain-of-function’ encompasses many types of experiments,” he added.

In July 2023, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) barred the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving federal grants for the next 10 years.

EcoHealth Alliance, whose mission statement declares it is “working to prevent pandemics,” had all of its grant funding pulled by HHS for the next three years on Tuesday.

"Working to prevent pandemics" is the precise opposite of what they actually did. They shouldn't have a 3-year suspension, they should have a 30-year prison sentence.

EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, in a hearing earlier this month before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, testified that his organization “never has and did not do gain-of-function research, by definition.”

But that claim directly contradicted Daszak’s private correspondence, including a 2016 email in which he celebrated the end of an Obama administration pause on gain-of-function research.

The EcoHealth head was also called out in sworn testimony to the COVID panel by Dr. Ralph Baric, a leading coronavirologist who initiated the research himself and declared it was “absolutely” gain-of-function.

In an October 2021 letter to Congress, Tabak had acknowledged NIH funded a “limited experiment” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”

He did not describe it as gain-of-function research — but disclosed that EcoHealth “failed to report” the bat coronaviruses modified with SARS and MERS viruses had been made 10,000 times more infectious, in violation of its grant terms.

The NIH scrubbed its website of a longstanding definition for gain-of-function research the same day that the letter was sent.

Tabak also noted in his October 2021 letter that the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant” from COVID-19 — but other grant proposals from EcoHealth have since drawn scrutiny for their genetic similarities.

Fauci has repeatedly denied that the Wuhan lab research involved gain-of-function experiments, clashing with Republicans in high-profile hearings and “playing semantics” with the term during a closed-door interview with the House COVID panel earlier this year.

“He needs to define his definition of gain-of-function research, because as I have through this process in the last three years, read many, many published articles about gain-of-function research, or creation of a chimera, this is a new one,” COVID subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said following Fauci’s grilling in January.

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Fauci ignored The Post’s questions about gain-of-function research in Wuhan during two days of closed-door testimony with the House subcommittee in January.

Getty Images for Haddad Media

The ex-NIAID head and White House medical adviser under President Biden was escorted by Capitol Police and his attorneys to and from the committee room for his two days of interviews — and repeatedly dodged The Post’s questions about gain-of-function research and pandemic lockdown restrictions.

In 2021, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held Fauci’s feet to the fire over the evasions in several hearings.

“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci declared that May.

That tells you all you ever need to know about Fauci.

For more on this story please continue reading at "In another House hearing" 

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The Distortion of Science To Support the Globalist's Climate Change Agenda - Dr Robert Malone

 

The Distortion of Science

To support the globalist's Climate Change agenda

ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS

JAN 1, 2024

598

170

Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manpulating science to favor specific commercial interests.

Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact.

The Unmaking of Science

The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette smoking and harms. This campaign lasted for almost 50 years, and was extremely successful… until it wasn’t. This tobacco industry’s strategic brilliance lay in the use of a marketing and advertising campaign (otherwise known as propaganda) to create scientific uncertainty and sow doubts in the minds of the general public. This, combined with legislative “lobbying” and strategic campaign “donations” undermined public health efforts and regulatory interventions to inform the public about the harms of smoking and the regulation of tobacco products.

Disrupting normative science has become a de rigueur component of the pharmaceutical industry business model. A new pharmaceutical product is not based on need, it is based on market size and profitability. When new data threatens the market of a pharmaceutical product, then that pharma company will try to sprout the seeds of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof. For instance, clinical trials can be easily coopted to meet specified end-points positive for the drug products. Other ways to manipulate a clinical trial include manipulating the dosing schedule and amounts. As these practices have been exposed, people no longer trust the science. Fast forward to the present, and the entire industry of evidence-based (and academic) medicine is now suspect due to the malfeasance of certain pharma players. In the case of COVID-19, Pharma propaganda and cooptation practices have now compromised the regulatory bodies controlling the pharma product licensing and deeply damaged global public confidence in those agencies.

We all know what climate change is. The truth is that the UN, most globalists and a wide range of world leaders” blame human activities for climate change. Whether or not climate change is real or that human activities are enhancing climate change is not important to this discussion. That is a subject for another day.

Most climate change scientists receive funding from the government. So they must comply with the government edict and policy position that human activity-caused climate change is an existential threat to both humankind and global ecosystems. When these “scientists” publish studies supporting the thesis that human activities cause climate change, they are more likely to receive more grant monies and therefore more publications- and therefore to be academically promoted (or at least to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of modern academe). Those who produce a counter narrative from the government approved one soon find themselves without funding, tenure, without jobs, unable to publish and unable to procure additional grants and contracts. It is a dead-end career wise. The system has been rigged.

And by the way, this is nothing new. Back in the day, during the “war on drugs, if a researcher who had funding by the NIH’s NIDA (National Institute of Drug Addiction) published an article or wrote an annual NIH grant report showing benefits to using recreational drugs, that would be a career ending move, as funding would not be renewed and new funding would never materialize. Remember, the NIH peer review system only triages grants, it does not actually chose who receives grant money. The administrative state at NIH does that! And anything that went against the war on drugs was considered a war on the government. Funding denied. This little truthbomb was conveyed to me - word of mouth- many years ago by a researcher and Professor who specialized in drug addiction research. Nothing printed, all hearsay. Because that is how the system works. A whisper campaign. A whiff of a message on the wind.

The ends justify the means.

The new wrinkle in what has now happened with corrupted climate change activism/propaganda/”science” is that the manipulation of research is crossing disciplines. No longer satisfied with oppressing climate change scientists, climate change narrative enforcers have moved into the nutritional sciences. This trend of crossing disciplines portends death for the overall independence of any scientific endeavors. A creeping corruption into adjacent disciplines. Because climate change activists, world leaders, research institutions, universities and governments are distorting another branch of science outside of climate science. They are using the bio-sciences, specifically nutrition science, to support the climate change agenda. It is another whole-of-government response to the crisis, just like with COVID-19.

Just like with the tobacco industry’s scientific disinformation campaign, they are distorting health research to make the case that eating meat is dangerous to humans. Normal standards for publication have been set aside. The propaganda is thick and easily spotted.

As the NIH is now funding researchers to find associations between climate change and health, it is pretty clear that those whose research is set-up to find such associations will be funded. Hence, once again, the system is rigged to support the climate change narrative.

The standard approach for nutritional research is based on a food-frequency and portion questionnaire - usually kept as a diary. The nutrient intake from this observational data set is then associated with disease incidence. Randomized interventional clinical trials are not done due to expense and bioethical considerations.

The problem is that the confounding variables in such studies are hard to control. Do obese people eat more, so would their intake of meat be more or less in proportion to dietary calories? What do they eat in combination? What about culture norms, combined with genetic drivers of disease? Age? Geo-considerations? The list of confounding variables is almost never ending. Garbage in, garbage out.

We have all witnessed how these studies get used to promulgate one point of view or another.

“It’s not just within the context of red meat. The same thing happens over and over. We get dietary recommendations put together by expert committees and the data are reviewed. But when subsequent, so-called systematic reviews of specific recommendations take place, the data don’t meet reliability standards…

Yes, available information is mostly based on studies of association rather than causation, using methods that fall short of proving chronic disease effects, especially in view of the crucial dietary measurement issues. The whole gestalt produces reports that seem very uncertain in terms of the standards that are applied elsewhere in the scientific community for reliable evidence.

Dr. Ross Prentice, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center