Fauci and "Good Faith"

Fauci and “Good Faith”MALONE.NEWSHe put the correct mortality estimate in his own notebook, published it under his own name, and gave Congress a figure three to five times higher. Eighteen months later, he was hiring litigators to claim a share of the product he was telling Americans to take.On 8 February 2020, Anthony Fauci took a morning telephone call from Tom Frieden, formerly the director of the CDC. He wrote down what they discussed. Both men agreed the new coronavirus was behaving like a bad influenza in transmissibility. Fauci recorded 34,867 known cases against 724 deaths, then observed that the real denominator was far larger than the confirmed count. That put the case fatality rate at 0.2 to 0.3 percent rather than 2.0 percent (Paul 2026).He was right, and the estimate has held up better than most of what was said in public over the two years that followed.Twenty days later, he published the same reasoning under his own name. Writing with H. Clifford Lane and Robert Redfield in theNew England Journal of Medicine, he noted that a reported case fatality rate near two percent rested on a case definition requiring pneumonia. If asymptomatic and minimally symptomatic infections ran several times the reported count, the true rate might fall considerably below one percent. The clinical consequences, the three authors wrote, could prove closer to those of a severe seasonal influenza, which they put at roughly 0.1 percent, than to SARS or MERS (Fauci, Lane, and Redfield 2020, 1268). The article went online on 28 February 2020.On 11 March 2020, he appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Chairwoman Maloney administered the oath, and the record reflects an affirmative response (U.S. House 2020, 4). Representative Michael Cloud of Texas asked how the virus compared to what had come before. Fauci answered that seasonal influenza carries a mortality of 0.1 percent, that the stated mortality for this virus was about three percent, and that counting minimally symptomatic and asymptomatic infection brought it to around one percent. Ten times more lethal than seasonal flu, he told the committee, adding that this was something people could get their arms around and understand (U.S. House 2020, 29).Thirty-two days separate the diary entry from the sworn testimony. In the middle of that window, he put the low figure into the most widely read medical journal in the English language.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The arithmeticThe obvious defense is that the science was evolving and that hindsight is cheap. It fails on the arithmetic.Both figures are denominator-adjusted. Neither is a raw count. On 8 February, he began with a raw rate of 2.0 percent and corrected downward roughly eightfold. On 11 March, under oath, he began with a raw rate of three percent and corrected downward roughly threefold. The operation is identical in both cases, reasoning about uncounted mild infections and enlarging the denominator to match. Privately he applied that correction with confidence. To Congress he applied less than half as much of it.New data moves an estimate. It does not explain why a man would apply a weaker version of his own published correction to a congressional committee than he had applied to his own notebook five weeks earlier. The intervening document runs against the defense rather than for it, because on 28 February, three weeks into the supposed evolution, he was still publishing the low number.A practice he has admittedHe has also described calibrating public figures deliberately. In December 2020 he told Donald McNeil of theNew York Timesthat he had been slowly and deliberately moving the goalposts on herd immunity, raising his public estimate from seventy to seventy-five percent toward eighty or eighty-five. He attributed the shift partly to new science and partly to polling. When surveys showed roughly half the country willing to take a vaccine, he cited the lower figure. When the polling improved, he judged that he could nudge the number up, because the country was finally ready to hear what he really thought (McNeil 2020).Masks are the second instance, and the structure differs. On 5 February 2020 Fauci wrote to Sylvia Burwell, formerly Secretary of Health and Human Services, that masks were meant for infected people rather than for protecting the uninfected. The email surfaced later under the Freedom of Information Act (Fauci 2020b). He told the country much the same thing on 60 Minutes in March, saying there was no reason to walk around in a mask, and warning that general use could exhaust the supply needed by healthcare workers (CBS News 2020).The private and the public statements agreed. The explanation changed afterward. In a June 2020 interview, he accounted for the early guidance by pointing to shortages of N95 and surgical masks, and to the need to protect access for healthcare workers treating infected patients (TheStreet 2020). On that account, a supply management objective, rather than his reading of the evidence, had shaped what the country was told. Harvard’s Kennedy School now teaches the episode as a case study under the heading of a noble lie (Harvard Kennedy School, n.d.).Twice, by his own account, his public statements were shaped by something other than his best reading of the evidence. The mortality gap is larger than either admitted instance, and he has never given any account of it at all.Why the number matteredNearly every projection made in 2020 was calculated from an assumed mortality rate. The estimate was an input, and the outputs moved with it.Five days after Fauci testified, Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College published Report 9. The model assumed an infection fatality ratio of 0.9 percent, within a stated range of 0.4 to 1.4 percent. Run without intervention, it projected roughly 510,000 deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million in the United States (Ferguson et al. 2020). A copy reached the Trump administration that weekend and the CDC the following Monday. Patrick Vallance, the British chief scientific adviser, confirmed that his government was working from it.In models of this kind, deaths scale with the fatality ratio in something close to a straight line. Hold the assumed attack rate constant, substitute the figure from Fauci’s own notebook, and the projection falls by roughly two thirds. The gap between 2.2 million dead Americans and something nearer 700,000 is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a catastrophe that suspends ordinary life and a severe epidemic that a country manages.Ferguson did not take his assumption from Fauci. He derived it from Chinese case data. But the sworn figure and the modeling input converged on the same number in the same week, and that number, rather than the one in the notebook, became the premise of American policy. Among the few people in the country positioned to tell the White House that the input might run three to five times high, one had written the lower figure down and published it. He did not offer it.The second problem was worse and lasted longer. A single national number carries the implication that risk is spread evenly across a population. COVID mortality was never spread evenly. It concentrated in the old and the already ill to a degree with few parallels in modern infectious disease.British government advisers noticed the consequence within days. On 22 March 2020 the behavioral science subgroup SPI-B submitted a paper to SAGE observing that many people did not feel personally threatened, and suggesting they had been reassured by the low death rate in their own demographic group. Its recommendation was that “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased” among the complacent, by means of emotionally forceful messaging (SPI-B 2020). SAGE discussed the paper the following day.A government advisory body had observed that the public correctly perceived its own low risk, identified that accuracy as an obstacle to compliance, and recommended raising the perception. The paper is British and I know of no published American equivalent. The mechanism it describes operated on both sides of the Atlantic.The result showed up in survey data by that summer. In July 2020 Franklin Templeton and Gallup surveyed just over ten thousand American adults about who was dying. Respondents believed that people aged 55 and over accounted for a little more than half of COVID deaths, when the actual share was 92 percent. They put deaths among those aged 44 and under at about 30 percent, against an actual figure of 2.7 percent. Risk to Americans aged 24 and under was overestimated by a factor of roughly fifty (Franklin Templeton and Gallup 2020). Among respondents aged 18 to 24, a group accounting for about a tenth of one percent of deaths, 58 percent expected serious health consequences from infection.A peer-reviewed survey study found the same misperception and traced it further. Deaths among Americans under 55 amounted to 7 percent of the national total, while respondents estimated 43 percent. Overestimating the risk was associated with greater household isolation, and greater household isolation was associated with more loneliness (JMIR 2021).An inflated national figure produced an inflated sense of personal danger, and the fear produced consent.Fauci’s own diary records him convincing the mayor of New York to close the city’s schools, a step he would later tell the public he had nothing to do with. Children were among the least endangered people in the country by a wide margin, a fact visible in the data by early 2020 and never seriously disputed since. National assessment scores afterward showed the largest mathematics declines ever recorded in that program, concentrated among the lowest-performing students.All of it followed from a single national mortality figure standing in place of an age-stratified one, and from the silence of the people who knew better.Fear and consentEmergency powers rest on public consent, and public consent tracks perceived danger. The British behavioral advisers put that relationship in writing, named accurate risk perception among the young and healthy as the obstacle to compliance, and recommended raising it.The measures Americans accepted had few peacetime precedents. Movement was restricted by executive decree, and businesses were closed by order, with the line between essential and inessential drawn by officials nobody had elected to draw it. Churches shut while liquor stores stayed open. Schools closed for a year, and considerably longer in some districts. Employment, education, and military service came to be conditioned on a medical procedure.Each of those measures required a public convinced that the danger justified it. The conviction was there, and it rested on a picture of the danger that was wrong. Americans under 55 accounted for 7 percent of deaths and were thought to account for 43. The young overestimated their own risk by a factor of fifty.Whether Anthony Fauci intended that misperception is not established by any document I have seen, and I will not assert it. No diary entry, email, or interview yet shows him linking a mortality figure to public compliance. The SPI-B paper is British and he had no part in it, which is why it belongs in this argument as evidence about pandemic governance rather than evidence about him.He has twice conceded that his public statements were shaped by objectives other than his best reading of the evidence. He privately held a mortality estimate three to five times below the figure he gave Congress under oath. He never corrected the record, and the higher figure underwrote the most sweeping peacetime restrictions in the history of the republic. Having twice explained that he sets public numbers by what he judges the public should hear, he has forfeited any presumption that the third occasion was innocent. He has been asked, and he has never answered.The question underneath is a political one. A government that secures compliance by managing what its citizens believe about their own risk has arranged for them to consent to what they would have refused had they been told the truth.That is the difference between governing a free people and administering one.The entry about the patentOne passage in the released diary has drawn almost no attention.“Moderna has not acted in good faith. They have actually put in their patent application and have explicitly stated that Barney Graham, John Mascola, and Kizzy Corbett are not inventors of the mRNA 1273 patent. This is absolutely outrageous, and I have had conversations with Francis Collins, Larry Tabak, and earlier this evening with Jeff <last name unknown- RWM> indicating that we need to get a heavy hitting law firm to argue our case. I suggested as did Jeff that we employ the firm of Williams & Connolly to represent us.”The dispute it describes is a matter of public record. In a July 2021 filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Moderna made a disclosure under 37 C.F.R. § 1.56. The company stated that its collaborators at NIH had submitted John Mascola, Barney Graham, and Kizzmekia Corbett as additional co-inventors. Moderna then stated that it had reached a good-faith determination that these individuals did not co-invent the mRNAs and mRNA compositions claimed (Public Citizen 2021, quoting application M1378.70145US07).Francis Collins went public that November, after private negotiations collapsed. Moderna had made a serious mistake, he said, in withholding co-inventorship credit from people who played a major role in a product the company was making a fair amount of money from (Reuters 2021). Moderna projected fifteen to eighteen billion dollars in COVID vaccine revenue for 2021 and ultimately booked roughly thirty-six billion across 2021 and 2022.Moderna told the Patent Office that its determination was made in good faith. Fauci wrote in his notebook that Moderna had not acted in good faith. Both invocations concerned who owned the patent, not what either party owed the people being asked to take the product.Two disputes, not oneThere were two separate fights with Moderna, and merging them is how this story keeps getting handed back to Fauci’s defenders.1.The first concerned the prefusion stabilization technique for coronavirus spike proteins, the 2P modification, invented by Barney Graham at NIAID with Jason McLellan, then at Dartmouth, and Andrew Ward at Scripps. It settled. Moderna executed a royalty-bearing license in December 2022 and disclosed a catch-up payment of four hundred million dollars to NIAID in its February 2023 earnings release, along with low single-digit royalties on future sales. NIAID shares that money with Dartmouth and Scripps (Moderna 2023).2.The second concerned inventorship of the mRNA-1273 sequence itself, the larger prize and the subject of the diary entry. It was still open when the first resolved.The diary entry belongs to the second fight. The four hundred million dollars belongs to the first. Both flowed to the institute Fauci directed.Moderna’s own filings show how entangled the two organizations were from the start. In a disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission the company stated that NIH and Moderna’s infectious disease research team finalized the vaccine sequence on 13 January 2020 (Moderna 2020). NIH’s technology transfer office lists Spikevax with a NIAID contribution described as research and development of prefusion-stabilized spike protein antigen mRNA technology, naming Graham among the inventors (NIH Office of Technology Transfer, n.d.).What the statute doesThe financial architecture is written into federal law rather than inferred from it.Under 15 U.S.C. § 3710c(a)(1)(A)(i), when a federal laboratory licenses an invention, the agency must pay the inventor or co-inventors the first two thousand dollars of royalties each year and at least fifteen percent of everything after that. Payments to any one person are capped at one hundred fifty thousand dollars annually unless the President approves more, and they continue after the inventor leaves government service (15 U.S.C. § 3710c(a)(3)). Whatever remains is retained by the laboratory that produced the invention.Inventorship on mRNA-1273 therefore carried two consequences. Graham, Mascola, and Corbett would each collect personally, at the statutory maximum for as long as the license generated revenue. NIAID would retain the remainder of a royalty stream drawn from a product with tens of billions of dollars in sales.What I am not claimingAnthony Fauci was not a named inventor on mRNA-1273, and he was not a named inventor on the stabilization patent either. He stood to receive no royalty from the four hundred million dollar payment. Anyone writing that he did is wrong, fact-checkers have correctly said so, and the claim should stay buried.Nor am I claiming that he inflated the mortality figure in order to enrich his institute. The patent entry postdates the March 2020 testimony by roughly eighteen months. A document written later cannot establish motive for a statement made earlier.The conflict of interest is structuralA structural conflict does more damage than a personal one, because nobody has to be bought and there is nothing to step away from.NIAID paid for the research. Its scientists helped design the stabilized spike protein used in the shot. It settled the final sequence with Moderna in January 2020, ran the trials, and held a royalty stake in the technology inside the product. Fauci ran NIAID. He also went on television night after night telling Americans to take the vaccine. In the middle of that, he called in NIH leadership to hire lawyers who could grow the institute’s share.No money has to reach him for this to be wrong. His institute had a financial stake in how well a product sold, and he was telling three hundred million people to take it. He was also running the legal fight to make that stake bigger. A journal author would have to declare an interest like that. So would a trial investigator, or anyone sitting on an FDA advisory panel. The public he spoke to every night was never told.Consent that is not informed is not consent. The principle is older than the Nuremberg Code and does not rest on it. A doctor who backs a product while holding a hidden stake in its sales has not always lied about the product. He has kept back the one fact you needed to judge what he said. The silence is the injury.None of this requires anyone to be corrupt on purpose. Nobody has to be bribed to end up biased. It is enough to sit inside a structure that pays better for one answer than the other, and people are very good at finding the answer that pays. A high death rate makes a vaccine essential and puts its emergency approval beyond argument. The lower figure, the one in his notebook and his journal article, makes it a judgment call. Careful doctors could differ. His institute had billions of reasons to prefer the first version, and nothing in the system was built to notice.The question of remorseFauci will not be prosecuted. The pardon issued in January 2025 is broad and covers federal conduct through its stated cutoff. It does not reach state offenses, does not bar civil action, does not touch congressional process, and protects nothing said afterward. If he gives false testimony to the Senate today, he does so without a net. For what he did between 2020 and 2024, the criminal courts are closed.What remains is whether he understands what he did, which is the question every legal system reaches after guilt is settled and before punishment is fixed.The diaries have produced a wave of commentary reaching for clinical vocabulary. One widely read column concluded that they paint him as a psychopath (Vespa 2026). The people writing this are political commentators borrowing a diagnostic term for emphasis, and the reach is a mistake.I have never examined Anthony Fauci and will not assign him a psychiatric label from across a hearing room. The stronger objection is that a diagnosis would be the most generous thing anyone has offered him. Disorders mitigate. A man who cannot help what he does is owed treatment and some measure of pity, and any court in the country would weigh it in his favor at sentencing.The record will not support that reading. It shows a competent physician who recorded an accurate estimate in private, published it under his own name, and gave a different number under oath five weeks later. The competence is what makes it culpable.The conduct itself is documented. He has never publicly revised the mortality figure he gave under oath, though his own contemporaneous notes and his own journal article contradict it. He told the country he had nothing to do with school closures, and the diary records him convincing the mayor of New York to close them. The six-foot distancing rule, he eventually conceded, sort of just appeared. He has never withdrawn his claim that criticism directed at him constituted an attack on science itself.Twice in the 11 March hearing, roughly fourteen pages before the mortality answer, he addressed his own candor directly. He told Representative Lynch that he had never held back telling exactly what was going on from a public health standpoint (U.S. House 2020, 15). He told Representative Green that he had never done anything other than state the exact scientific evidence (U.S. House 2020, 24). Both are categorical claims, made under oath, in the same appearance that produced a mortality figure his own notebook contradicts.Five years of documented error, and not one correction has ever issued from him unprompted. Every concession has been extracted under questioning. That is a pattern rather than a diagnosis, it sits in the public record, and readers are competent to weigh it themselves.BurdickOne act of his own speaks to the question more clearly than any interview he has given. He accepted the pardon.InBurdick v. United Statesthe Supreme Court considered a newspaper editor who refused a presidential pardon so that he could continue asserting his privilege against self-incrimination. Justice McKenna wrote for a unanimous Court that a pardon carries an imputation of guilt, and that acceptance of it is a confession of that guilt (Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79, 94 (1915)). Honesty requires the qualification. Later courts have generally treated that language as dicta rather than binding rule, andBiddle v. Perovichheld that acceptance is not required for a pardon to take effect (274 U.S. 480 (1927)).The doctrinal question can be set aside. The moral observation survives it. Burdick understood that taking a pardon says something about the man who takes it, and he refused one rather than say it.A man who had spent five years insisting he told the country the exact scientific evidence had an obvious course available to him. He could have declined, gone before a grand jury, and let the documents speak. By his own account he had nothing to fear from them.He took the pardon instead. Nobody forced it on him. He chose it knowing what his own notebook said, and knowing what a jury would have made of those thirty-two days in the winter of 2020. That judgment now falls to the rest of us.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareReferences“Association of COVID-19 Risk Misperceptions with Household Isolation in the United States: Survey Study.” 2021.Journal of Medical Internet Research. PMC8407438.Biddle v. Perovich, 274 U.S. 480 (1927).Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79 (1915).CBS News. 2020. Interview with Anthony S. Fauci.60 Minutes, March.Fauci, Anthony S. 2020b. Email to Sylvia Burwell, 5 February. Released under the Freedom of Information Act.Fauci, Anthony S., H. Clifford Lane, and Robert R. Redfield. 2020. “Covid-19: Navigating the Uncharted.”New England Journal of Medicine382 (13): 1268-1269. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMe2002387. Published online 28 February 2020.Federal Technology Transfer Act provisions on royalty distribution. 15 U.S.C. § 3710c.Ferguson, Neil M., et al. 2020.Report 9: Impact of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand. Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, 16 March.Franklin Templeton and Gallup. 2020.Economics of Recovery Study. Survey of 10,014 U.S. adults, fielded 2 to 14 July.Harvard Kennedy School. n.d. “A Noble Lie? Dr. Anthony Fauci and Masking in the United States.” Case Program.McNeil, Donald G., Jr. 2020. “How Much Herd Immunity Is Enough?”New York Times, 24 December.Moderna, Inc. 2020. Current Report, Exhibit 99.1. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR, CIK 0001682852.Moderna, Inc. 2023. Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2022 Financial Results. 23 February.NIH Office of Technology Transfer. n.d. “Spikevax.” Technology Transfer Showcase. https://www.techtransfer.nih.gov/showcase/spikevax-r.Paul, Rand. 2026. “Tony’s Diary.” The Reading Room, U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 24 July.Public Citizen. 2021. “Letter Urging NIH to Reclaim Foundational Role in NIH-Moderna Vaccine.” 9 November. Quoting Moderna patent application M1378.70145US07, disclosure under 37 C.F.R. § 1.56.Reuters. 2021. “Moderna Covid-19 Vaccine Patent Dispute Headed to Court, NIH Head Says.” 10 November.Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B). 2020.Options for Increasing Adherence to Social Distancing Measures. Paper prepared for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, 22 March. Discussed at SAGE meeting 18, 23 March.TheStreet. 2020. Interview with Anthony S. Fauci, 12 June.U.S. House. 2020.Coronavirus Preparedness and Response. Hearing before the Committee on Oversight and Reform, 116th Cong., 2nd sess., 11 and 12 March. Serial No. 116-96. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office.Vespa, Matt. 2026. “This Fauci Diary Entry Will Cause Your Blood to Boil.”Townhall, 28 July.


Senator Paul Should Ask Fauci Why Moderna's 2016 Patented Gene Sequence Turned Up in SARS-CoV-2

Last year I had conversations with Senator Rand Paul and former CDC Director, Robert Redfield in which I asked them if they are aware of the gene sequence that Moderna patented in 2016 that was subsequently found in SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19.Both men stated that they’d heard of this extraordinary finding, but neither expressed much interest in it. I followed up by sending one of Senator Paul’s staff a link to the paper in which this critical finding was presented, but I never heard back from her.With Fauci headed to the Senate tomorrow (July 29, 2026) I am hoping that Senator Paul will ask him about Moderna’s 2016 patent.To review the documentation: On February 21, 2022,Frontiers in Virologypublished a report titledMSH3 Homology and Potential Recombination Link to SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Site.The Furin Cleavage Site is the component of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that enables the virus to dock onto human lung epithelial cells, thereby initiating the viral replication process. It is the key feature of SARS-CoV-2 that made it infectious to humans. Examining the genetic code of this part of the spike protein, the authors noted that part of the sequence was a perfect match to a genetic sequencepatented in 2016 by Bancel S. et al. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Among numerous point mutation differences between the SARS-CoV-2 and the bat RaTG13 coronavirus, only the 12-nucleotide furin cleavage site (FCS) exceeds 3 nucleotides. A BLAST search revealed that a 19 nucleotide portion of the SARS-CoV-2 genome encompassing the furin cleavage site is a 100% complementary match to a codon-optimized proprietary sequence that is the reverse complement of the human mutS homolog (MSH3).  (. . .)SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein and MSH3A peculiar feature of the nucleotide sequence encoding the PRRA furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 S protein is its two consecutive CGG codons. This arginine codon is rare in coronaviruses: relative synonymous codon usage (RSCU) of CGG in pangolin CoV is 0, in bat CoV 0.08, in SARS-CoV 0.19, in MERS-CoV 0.25, and in SARS-CoV-2 0.299 (8).A BLAST search for the 12-nucleotide insertion led us to a 100% reverse match in a proprietary sequence (SEQ ID11652, nt 2751-2733) found in the US patent 9,587,003 filed on Feb. 4, 2016 (9)On the question of whether this perfect match could be merely coincidental, the authors noted:Conventional biostatistical analysis indicates that the probability of this sequence randomly being present in a 30,000-nucleotide viral genome is 3.21×10^-11 [or 1 in 3.21 trillion].TheDaily MailreportedtheFrontiers in Virologyreport, which prompted Fox News’s Maria Bartiromoto question Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancelabout his 2016 gene patent (advance the tape to 7:20).His cool brushoff was suggestive of a man unconcerned about media queries. Why should he be? When it comes to the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, the US mainstream media rarely asks tough questions, andneverpursues serious inquiry.Inquisitive viewers might have wondered: Who is Stéphane Bancel, and why is a French national heading a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that was originally funded by aDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant?Prior to become CEO of Moderna, Bancel was CEO of the French in vitro diagnostics company, bioMérieux, from 2007-2011. The large company, operating in over 160 countries, originated in the Institut Mérieux in Lyon, France, founded by biologist Marcel Mérieux (a colleague of Louis Pasteur).Marcel’s grandson, Alain Mérieux, is the company’s chief proprietor and (according to Bloomberg) worth approximately $8.80 billion. A personal acquaintance of Jacques Chirac (French President from 1995-2007), in 2003 (following the outbreak of the first SARS) Mérieux was instrumental in forming a cooperative agreement between France and China to build a BSL-4 lab annex to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Bancel was CEO of bioMérieux during the planning and early construction of the lab and the training of its Chinese staff at bioMérieux’s lab in Lyon. In the year 2007, Bancel oversaw the company’s opening of a new division in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As noted in itsannual report:The opening in 2007 of a dedicated theranostics division in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), a city with an especially high concentration of biotechnology firms and research centers, puts bioMérieux in a hub for personalized medicine, in direct contact with the most influential players in the field.Four years later, in 2011, Bancel left his plum position at bioMérieux to become CEO of the Cambridge startup Moderna. Back then it seemed like a Quixotic decision. After all, the new company had just one employee and was exclusively focused on developing mRNA therapeutics. As Bancel statedin a December 2020 interview,“When I resigned from my last company, bioMerieux, to start on this journey at Moderna, I told my wife there was only a 5% chance it would work out.”Two years after its founding, Moderna—short for “Modified RNA”—drew interest from DARPA, which awarded it a $25 million grant to develop messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics. Sometime around 2015, Moderna began collaborating with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to develop mRNA vaccines against the SARS and MERS coronaviruses.In the year 2016, Bancel et al. filed for their patent of the genetic sequence for part of the coronavirus spike protein furin cleavage site—the same genetic sequence that was, four years later, found in the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 that apparently leaked from the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan. This was the same lab whose construction Bancel oversaw and whose personnel his company trained.Bancel’s decision to leave bioMerieux to lead Moderna worked out well. On March 16, 2020—just five days after the WHO declared SARS-CoV-2 to be the causative agent of a worldwide pandemic,NIAID issued a press releasestating it had commenced human trials of its mRNA-1273 vaccine.mRNA-1273 was developed by NIAID scientists and their collaborators at the biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) supported the manufacturing of the vaccine candidate for the Phase 1 clinical trial.Less than a year later—with the United States government relentlessly pushing Moderna’s mRNA and Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines as the ONLY solution to the COVID-19 pandemic,Stephane Bancel became a billionaire.[i]Kristopher M. Curtis, Boyd Yount, Ralph S. Baric. Methods for producing recombinant coronavirus. 2002-04-19, Application US10/474,962 filed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en[ii]Cherry JD, Krogstad P. SARS: the first pandemic of the 21st century. Pediatr Res. 2004 Jul;56(1):1-5. doi: 10.1203/01.PDR.0000129184.87042.FC. Epub 2004 May 19. PMID: 15152053; PMCID: PMC7086556.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7086556/[iii]WHO announces discovery of virus that causes SARS, UN NEWS, 16 April 2003.https://news.un.org/en/story/2003/04/64992AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you enjoyed reading this post, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For only $5.00 per month, you can really help to support our efforts to investigate and report what is going on in our increasingly strange and confusing world.Subscribe nowShareCourageous Discourse with Dr. Peter McCullough & John Leake is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, the Wuhan Lab, a critical gene patent, and the U.S. government's curious lack of interest in what appears to be a smoking gun.


Brown Squirt Summer: How the Cyclospora Outbreak is Ruining It

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHThe summer of 2026 will be a remembered by Cyclospora victims for spending a lot of unpleasant time on the toilet.🦠 Cyclospora Outbreak: Dr. Peter McCullough onReal America’s Voice LiveThe Basics of the ParasiteDr. Peter McCullough, Chief Scientific Officer of The Wellness Company, joined host Steve Gruber to break down thecyclospora outbreaksweeping the country. McCullough described cyclospora as aprotozoa — essentially a parasite— that thrives in stagnant water like ponds. When contaminated water is used to irrigate crops, the parasite hitches a ride onto produce, particularly lettuce, strawberries, and raspberries.The Tainted Lettuce TrailEarly epidemiology pointed toshredded iceberg lettuceserved at Taco Bell, with investigators tracing the supply back toTaylor Farms in Mexico, a massive operation that ships to over half of U.S. states — supplying Kroger, Walmart, Meijer, and countless restaurants. However, McCullough noted a critical twist: thePCR test used to link the outbreak to Taylor Farms came back as a false positive, meaning investigators are back to relying on epidemiological guesswork. He expressed sympathy for Taylor Farms, saying they got “fingered” on faulty lab work.Symptoms You Don’t WantMcCullough didn’t sugarcoat it: the hallmark isexplosive, watery diarrhea that can last up to a month, accompanied by low-grade fever, abdominal cramping, and serious dehydration risk — especially for seniors and those in congregate living. He revealed a family in his own office is battling it right now.Treatment and PreparednessThe good news? Cyclospora ishighly treatablewithtrimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim/Septra)— one tablet twice daily for seven days. McCullough advised treatingempiricallyrather than waiting for ER testing, since not all facilities carry the PCR assay for cyclospora. His rule of thumb:“Explosive watery diarrhea is cyclospora until proven otherwise.”He also recommended keeping Imodium on hand, staying hydrated, and washing each individual lettuce leaf under running water followed by a salad spinner.The Wellness Company PitchBoth men touted theaquamarine blueEmergency Medical Kitfrom The Wellness Company, which includes trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and a guidebook. Gruber keeps one on his desk and urged viewers to grab the travel kit for summer trips. Promo codeFOCALPOINTS.💩 The Summer of ‘26 LegacyGruber tried valiantly to keep it professional, but let’s be honest — between the phrase “explosive watery diarrhea” being uttered on live television roughly a dozen times and McCullough casually noting his own child suffered through it, the summer of 2026 is shaping up to be less about patriotic fireworks and more about Americans white-knuckling their way to the bathroom, praying they didn’t eat too much of the side salad.FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Please subscribe toFOCAL POINTSas a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth.AlterAImay be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHChief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Companywww.twc.health/focalpoints

Summary: Taco Bell, a False Positive PCR Test, and Mexican Lettuce Turned America's Bathrooms into War Zones — Featuring Dr. Peter McCullough's Guide to Not Shitting Your Pants for a Month


Presiding Over a Nation Gone Mad

Responsible and prudent rulers avoid saying and doing things that cause fear and loathing to spread in the populace. A tragic feature of the human condition is the strong and persistent tendency of rulers to incite fear to manipulate the people to wage war. The enemy could be framed as any class, ethnic group, religious sect, nation, political party, or even natural phenomena such as “climate change” or an infectious disease pathogen such as SARS-COV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. Incited and amplified by propaganda, fear may spread through a population, compelling the people to participate in highly irrational and destructive collective actions. Rulers can either take action to dampen fear, or they can fan the flames because they believe that doing so serves their interests.—Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions,by John LeakeSubscribe nowShare

Summary: With Anthony Fauci headed to the Senate on July 29, a brief review in pictures of the fraud and madness that were unleashed under his watch as the Pandemic Pontifex Maximus ("I am science.")


Senator Paul Should Ask Fauci about NIAID's December 2019 mRNA Coronavirus Vaccine Candidate

A conspicuous feature of the development timeline of the Moderna-NIAID mRNA-1273 Coronavirus vaccine is aMATERIAL TRANSFER AGREEMENT(see pages105-107) from NIAID/Moderna (“Provider”) to Ralph Baric (“Research Recipient”). The Agreement specifies the transfer of “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna” to Dr. Baric “to perform challenge studies with the mRNA vaccine.”The Agreement is signed by Ralph Baric onDecember 12, 2019—19 days before theWuhan Municipal Health Commission informed the WHO China Country Officeof “cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China on December 31, 2019, and 55 days before the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published on February 5, 2020.Why did NIAID and Moderna believe that Dr. Baric was equipped to challenge their “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates”? Did they provide Dr. Baric with the coronaviruses to be used for his challenge studies, or did he already possess them in his laboratory?This collaboration, which was consummated on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, proved to be very profitable for NIAID and Moderna.The reader may recall that Ralph Baric had long worked with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to developchimeric coronaviruses transmissible to humans, and published papers in 2015 and 2016 in which he declared that he had successfully developed such chimeras. That he was asked to perform the challenge experiments on the NIAID-Modernavaccine is consistent withModerna’s 2016 patented gene sequencethat was subsequently found in SARS-CoV-2.It would be perfectly reasonable for Senator Paul to ask Dr. Fauci to elucidate the genetic code of the December 2019 “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna,”as well as the genome of the viral pathogen that Dr. Baric used to challenge the vaccine.Subscribe nowShare

Summary: Ralph Baric signed a Material Transfer Agreement with NIAID on Dec. 12, 2019 for challenge experiments. What was its genetic code of the vaccine, and what pathogen did Baric use to challenge it?


Cyclospora Cramping Summer Fun, FDA and Peptides, MAHA Fades

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHPlease enjoy this July 28, 2026 on the Cyclospora outbreak, FDA review of peptides, and the fall of MAHA.  Dr Peter McCullough joinsDr Gina Loudon on American Sunrise, Real America’s Voice.Please note Wednesday July 29, 2026 Dr Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify in the US Senate, and provided he does not cancel which is a real possibility, McCullough Foundation and Focal Points will be bringing you all the coverage an analysis.FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Please subscribe toFOCAL POINTSas a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth.AlterAImay be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHChief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Companywww.twc.health/focalpoints

Summary: Dr Peter McCullough with Dr Gina Loudon on American Sunrise


Fauci Inquisition is Distraction from the Documents of Malfeasance and Crime

Watching today’s Senate hearing, I cannot rid myself of the perception that it is a distraction from documentary evidence of malfeasance, fraud, mass negligent homicide, and murder.Dr. Fauci may indeed plead the 5th, or claim that he has forgotten many details, or claim that he was simply unaware of all the policy deliberations that were going on in the interface between HHS, DoD, Congress, and the White House.However, his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination cannot delete or alter  the existence of NIAID’s work product and the vast academic and bureaucratic paper trail—frequently cited in NIAID documents—that documents all of above.These include the subjects of my last two posts—namely, the documentary evidence that in 2016,Moderna patented a critical gene sequencethat was later found to be a precise match for the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site, as well as NIAID’s Dec. 12, 2019Material Transfer Agreementfor shipping the NIAID-Moderna mRNA Coronavirus Vaccine candidate to UNC Professor Ralph Baric for performing challenge experiments.Likewise, Ralph Baric’s2015 and 2016 papers—in which he explicitly declares that he has successfully created chimeric SARS coronaviruses that will infect and transmit among humanized mice—are at hand for anyone to read, though I have yet to see a SINGLE mainstream media report on them. In Baric’s own biosecurity clause, he expressly states that his Gain-of-Function experiments on SARS Coronaviruses were approved before the 2014 administrative pause on GoF.Fauci’s leadership role in suppressing safe and effective early treatment modalities is also extensively documented with hundreds of citations in our bookThe Courage to Face COVID-19, as was his corrupt promotion of Remdesivir.If I were Senators Paul and Johnson, I would limit my questions to addressing the available documentary evidence that the mainstream media NEVER reports. If Fauci pleads the 5th regarding his awareness of these documents, it cannot let him or the other senior officers at NIAID off the hook.I sometimes wonder if such Senate hearings are a spectacle for giving the American people the impression that Republicans and Democrats are in the business of sincere and searching debate about major public policy issues.Republicans like Senators Paul and Johnson are admired and cheered by their constituencies, while Democrat Senators like Gary Peters, Maggie Hassan, and Richard Blumenthal are admired and cheered by their constituencies. However, in the critical business of bringing powerful public officials to justice, nothing is ever achieved. The segment of the US population that despises Fauci will take satisfaction in seeing him squirm, while the constituency that adores Fauci will revel in self-righteous outrage that the old man is being made to squirm.The upshot is that the military-industrial-complex, the bio-pharmaceutical complex, and the big Wall Street banks continue to do whatever in hell they want and get away with murder, while ordinary Americans are left to squabble with each other along partisan political lines, failing to see that the problem is NOT Democrats or Republicans, but the entire corrupt apparatus of central, state power.This is one of the main themes of my new book,Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions. If you found this post interesting and informative, please purchase a copy on Amazon.Subscribe nowShare

Summary: As much as we admire Senators Paul and Johnson, I fear today's vaunted Senate hearing is a distraction from NIAID's own documents.


Chris Martenson On the Coming Energy Shock

Dear Substack Readers,Please listen to and share my conversation with Chris Martenson about the coming energy shock if the Trump administration doesn't soon make a deal with Iran.ABOUT CHRIS: Chris Martenson, PhD (Duke), MBA (Cornell) is an economic researcher and futurist specializing in energy and resource depletion, and co-founder of PeakProsperity.com (along with Adam Taggart). As one of the early econobloggers who forecasted the housing market collapse and stock market correction years in advance, Chris rose to prominence with the launch of his seminal video seminar: The Crash Course which has also been published in book form (Wiley, March 2011) and is a popular, highly regarded distillation of the interconnected forces in the Economy, Energy and the Environment (the "Three Es" as Chris calls them) that are shaping the future.Subscribe nowShare

Summary: Interview with renowned energy analyst about the economic devastation that awaits us if President Trump does not soon make a deal with Iran to restore peaceful navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.


BREAKING--Guilt-Ridden Anthony Fauci Pleads the Fifth Amendment 111 Times

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHI wondered if Dr Anthony Fauci would show up today to face questions from US Senators.  Well he arrived, heavily guarded, shoulders slumped, and in a perpetual scornful, frown.  When he read his opening statement, he was visibly trembling.   His impetulant attorney was escorted out of the room after Senator Rand Paul gave him plenty of opportunity to sit behind his witness and be quiet.  OnWednesday, July 29, 2026, Capitol Police escortedDavid Schertler, the attorney for Dr. Anthony Fauci, out of the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing after a heated exchange with ChairmanSenator Rand Paul.Then for the next 111 questions Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions.  The phrase "pleading the Fifth" specifically references theself-incrimination clause. In daily life, this right is most recognizable throughMiranda warnings, which require police to tell suspects they have the "right to remain silent." Legally, an individual can refuse to answer questions from police, investigators, or congressional committees if their responses could potentially be used to convict them of a crime.Dr Anthony Fauci appeared to be a man who had lost his way.  From a Division Director at the NIH for decades, over the course of time he had become a megalomaniac driven by fame and fortune.  During the greatest infectious disease crisis of his career, instead of humbly serving and putting the survival of Americans first, he was working to collect cash prizes and grab photo shoots for style magazines.SenatorJosh Hawley lambasted Fauciunlike any other doctor who had ever appeared in the US Senate.  His closing remark came at the end of a scathing conclusion where Hawley blasted Fauci for repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment rights during the hearing. Leading up to that final line, Hawley told Fauci that he had become a“narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,”accused him of lying to the American people and Congress, and referenced newly leaked pandemic journals by telling him he had“disgraced [his] profession.finished his fiery questioning of Dr. Anthony Fauci by saying: [1,2,3]“You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime. And I hope you’ll go home and write that in your diary. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”[1]Here is my reaction just a few hours later on America’s Voice with Steve Gruber.FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth.AlterAImay be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHPresident, McCullough Foundation

Summary: US Senate inquiry frames Fauci as a national disgrace


Homesteading: Pumpkins, Sour Dough and the Camel

By: JGMPumpkin-SquashLast summer we grew a lot of pumpkins. And by “a lot,” I mean somewhere around 300 pounds of pumpkins.I gave plenty away, cooked some down and froze it for later, and we ate our fair share. Even so, I still had roughly 150 pounds left over. Some became horse treats. Some went to the chickens. The rest eventually succumbed to gravity, mold, and neglect - making a rather large mess in the storage room before making the final trip to the compost pile.Fortunately, we had much better luck with the yellow squash. We managed to keep up with most of it, although a couple escaped our notice and grew into yellow clubs that looked capable of defending the garden from intruders. For some reason, our dogs have no interest in eating raw squash.  Kind of weird, given that they seem to eat everything else.You would think that was the end of the story. Harvest over. Crops finished. Everything either eaten or composted or molded into oblivion.Not quite.Those discarded pumpkins were full of viable seeds, and many survived buried deep in the compost pile. This spring, we spread some of that finished compost over the front garden.Almost immediately, enormous vines appeared.“Wonderful,” I thought. “Free pumpkins.”Well... maybe.Here’s where things get interesting.Pumpkins are squash, and squash are notorious for cross-pollinating with other compatible squash varieties. Bees don’t care what they’re carrying from flower to flower. They simply visit blossoms all day, happily mixing pollen between plants.The vines certainly looked like pumpkins, but when the fruit began to develop, something was clearly different. They weren’t quite pumpkins, and they weren’t quite yellow squash either. The shape landed somewhere in between. The color leaned orange rather than bright yellow. The skin was noticeably thinner and bruised easily. The flesh was perfectly edible, but the texture and flavor were closer to a winter squash than the pie pumpkins we had planted the year before.This is one of the quirks of open pollination.For many vegetables, saving seed works beautifully. Tomatoes, beans, peas, and lettuce are often reliable if they’re isolated or naturally self-pollinating. Squash, on the other hand, are genetic gamblers. Unless you deliberately control pollination, you never quite know what the next generation is going to produce.Sometimes you stumble onto something wonderful.Sometimes you end up with some sort of watery, bitter-tasting squash that neither tastes good nor stores well.  Which is why some seeds are best bought at the store, unless you have a heck of a lot of room to separate plants or grow only one squash type per year.CarrotsOne interesting surprise came from the carrots.A few escaped harvest and remained buried in the garden over winter. Come spring, they sent up fresh green tops, bolted, flowered, and eventually produced thousands of tiny seeds. We collected them, and now they’re drying nicely, soon to be tucked away in an envelope for next year’s planting. Honestly, carrots as an ornamental never crossed my mind until I actually had last year’s carrots bloom.  They have been a beautiful addition to the garden.We now have volunteer carrot plants popping up all over the farm. The wind, birds, and probably a few overly helpful guinea fowl seem to have taken it upon themselves to distribute last year’s seed crop far more efficiently than we ever could.I am curious whether carrots will naturalize in Virginia, given half the chance.  I guess next year, we will find out!Pasture workMowing has become the primary focus of farm chores this past month.Lots and lots of pasture to mow!Last week, Robert tackled the enormous job of reclaiming a large stretch of land along the river that had become completely unusable. Ever since a micro-tornado took out a few trees a couple of years ago, the area had been littered with old tree stumps, piles of debris, forgotten farm “treasures,” and enough brambles to discourage anyone from walking through it.Getting it to the point you see below took heavy equipment, countless hours on the tractor, and a lot of determination.The payoff? We’ve reclaimed about an acre of usable land and a better walking/riding path to the river. Robert has already seeded it with a mix of clover and fescue, and if all goes according to plan, this will eventually become our farm’s shooting range.It never ceases to amaze me how much work goes into creating what, at first glance, looks like an empty field.Bread MakingI get into details here - so some may wish to skip this section)So, for years I have made about 50% of the bread we eat.  I used to use a bread maker to mix the dough and for the rise, then bake it in our own oven.  When I do this, I use a big cast iron bread pan or a round enameled cast iron Dutch oven. Such as this:.My baking method gives the loaf a beautiful crust. The basic process is straightforward:Preheat both the oven and the Dutch oven to 450°F.Score the loaf with one or more slashes to allow steam to escape during baking.Place the shaped loaf on a sheet of parchment paper.Carefully lower the parchment and dough into the preheated Dutch oven.Slip 4 to 6 ice cubes between the parchment paper and the side of the pan.Cover with the lid and bake for 20 minutes. The steam created inside the Dutch oven gives the loaf an excellent “oven spring,” producing a dramatic rise in the hot, humid environment.Reduce the oven temperature to 400°F.Remove the lid and continue baking for another 30 minutes or so, depending on the size and shape of the loaf, until the crust reaches the color I want. Removing the lid too early can limit oven spring, while taking the bread out before it is fully baked leaves the interior underdone.All that said, Robert still found that even my organic flour bread sometimes caused digestive upset. So, somewhat reluctantly, I turned to sourdough:Why reluctantly? Because maintaining a sourdough culture and baking with it is a bit of a pain in the arse. It required learning an entirely new set of bread-baking skills.The thing about baking bread is that no two loaves are ever exactly alike. Sourdough is even more finicky than commercial yeast breads. We all go through various contortions trying to make every loaf as consistent as the last, but countless variables get in the way. Humidity, room temperature, water temperature, the activity of the starter, flour characteristics, fermentation time, and proofing time all affect the final loaf. Those of us who bake regularly become almost superstitious about repeating exactly the same routine every time.Taking on sourdough meant learning a whole new set of variables.Unlike commercial baker’s yeast, a sourdough “mother” is a living culture containing both wild yeast and beneficial bacteria. During fermentation, those bacteria break down some of the gluten and other wheat proteins while producing organic acids that many people find make the bread easier to digest. It is important to note that sourdough is not gluten-free. Gluten is reduced, not eliminated.Having kept a sourdough mother alive for months at a time before, I knew the routine was rather tedious. Traditionally, you discard about half of the starter, then replace it with equal parts flour and lukewarm water, mixing it into a paste about the consistency of smooth peanut butter. You let it sit in a warm place until it doubles or triples in size, then repeat the process. Depending on how often you bake, that can mean feeding it anywhere from three to five times each week. It consumes quite a bit of flour and can become a real time sink.Once a healthy mother has been established, it can be stored in the refrigerator. At that point, many bakers feed it about once a week, allowing it to become fully active before returning a portion to the refrigerator until the next feeding. Even then, it requires regular attention and enough time at home to keep the culture healthy.So I came up with another approach.Instead of discarding starter, I kept building it until I had enough active starter to make roughly ten to fifteen loaves of bread. I then go through the rather tedious process of mixing, fermenting, shaping, and baking that entire batch at once before freezing the finished loaves. As one can’t do the entire batch all at once, without a commercial kitchen, so I have to sequentially weigh, mix, knead, rise, knead again, proof, refrigerate, etc.  For basic directions or to learn more about sourdough baking or feeding a mother, I recommendthis siteand then scale up…Now I no longer have to bake bread every week, or even every month. Instead, I simply pull a loaf from the freezer, let it thaw, and we have fresh sourdough whenever we want it. Rather than interrupting my schedule every week, I spend a couple of busy days baking every two or three months.Whew. More work on those baking days, but far more manageable with my schedule. And I can schedule when I want to take on this homesteading project.  So, I can control the sourdough - rather than it controlling me.Even with this system, though, the mother still needed to be fed every week, which is essentially a 24-hour process.A Few Tips for Baking BreadWeigh your ingredients.A digital food scale costs well under $15 and will last for years. It is one of the best investments you can make if you want consistently good bread.If you’re making yeast breads, consider using a bread machine for mixing and the first rise.Personally, I’m not fond of the crust a bread machine produces, so I use it only for kneading and proofing before baking in a Dutch oven using the method described above. If you’re just beginning your bread-making journey, though, a bread machine can be a great confidence builder. New ones aren’t inexpensive, but thrift stores often have them for a fraction of the retail price.Don’t rush the process.Good bread rewards patience. Most disappointing loaves come from trying to hurry the rise or shorten the fermentation time.Don’t expect 100% whole wheat bread to behave like white bread.Whole wheat contains the bran and germ, which interfere with gluten development and produce a denser loaf. For yeast breads, I recommend starting with a 50:50 blend of whole wheat and white bread flour. For sourdough, I generally use about one part whole wheat to five parts white flour, although you can gradually increase the whole wheat as you gain experience.Experiment with different crust finishes.Dust the loaf with flour for a rustic look, brush it with egg or egg white for a glossy crust, or use milk or water for a softer finish. Sprinkle on sesame, poppy, or other seeds before baking for both flavor and appearance.Consider grinding your own wheat berries for the whole wheat portion of the flour.Hard white wheat berries are my favorite because they produce a lighter, sweeter whole wheat loaf than hard red wheat. I typically buy 50-pound bags of organic hard white wheat berries along with organic white bread flour. Stored in a cool, dark, dry place, such as a closet or pantry, both will keep for at least a year. The biggest risk is pantry pests like grain moths or weevils. I haven’t had an infestation in years, but it’s always something to watch for.Grinding your own flour is surprisingly easy.A Vitamix or another high-powered blender will grind wheat berries into flour in about a minute on high speed. Most can handle about 1½ to 2 cups at a time. I usually grind enough flour to last about two months, which gives me the flavor and nutrition of freshly milled grain without having to grind flour every time I bake.Sourdough bread from the last batch that I madeThen I stumbled onto another trick that completely changed how I think about maintaining a sourdough mother.You can simply dehydrate it.That means no more weekly feedings if you don’t feel like baking for a while. No worrying about the starter dying in the back of the refrigerator while you’re traveling. No guilt over neglecting it. Enquiring minds want to know: is it weird to have guilt over sourdough mother neglect?  Just dry it, store it, and bring it back to life when you’re ready.The method below is adapted from King Arthur Baking, with a few tweaks that have worked well for meHow to Dehydrate a Sourdough Mother1. Start with a healthy, active mother.Feed your starter just as though you were getting ready to bake. If it has been living in the refrigerator, let it come to room temperature and feed it equal parts unbleached all-purpose flour and lukewarm water. Leave it covered until it is bubbly, active, and at its peak.2. Spread it out as thinly as possible.Spread the entire starter onto parchment paper. I usually divide it between two sheets simply because it is easier to handle. Use an offset spatula, silicone spatula, or bowl scraper to spread it into a very thin layer. The thinner the layer, the faster and more evenly it dries.3. Let it dry completely.This is the part where patience comes in.Leave the starter to dry at room temperature until it is completely brittle. Depending on the humidity where you live, this can take anywhere from a day to nearly a week. Virginia summers take considerably longer than an Arizona desert.If you live somewhere humid, you can speed things up by placing the trays in your oven with only the oven light turned on. The tiny amount of heat from the light is usually enough to help the drying process. Donotturn on the oven itself. Too much heat will kill the wild yeast and beneficial bacteria that make sourdough work.When the starter is fully dry, it should peel easily from the parchment and snap cleanly between your fingers.Tip: If you don’t have parchment, just spread it on a clean cookie sheet - and use a spatula to scrape the dried starter off when ready.Storing the Dried StarterBreak the dried starter into small flakes.You can certainly store the flakes as they are, but I prefer running them through a food processor for a few seconds. That reduces them to coarse flakes or powder, which cuts the storage space to about one-quarter of the original volume.Store the dried starter in an airtight glass jar. Label it with the date so that months later no one mistakes it for something that belongs in the compost.Keep the jar in a cool, dark, dry place. It doesn’t need refrigeration, just reasonable storage conditions. A pantry or closet shelf is perfect.Properly dried, the starter will keep for a very long time. Some bakers have successfully revived starter that was stored for years.Bringing It Back to LifeWhen you’re ready to bake again, simply measure out about one ounce of the dried starter, roughly one-eighth of the amount you originally dried. If you don’t own a scale, this is approximately one-quarter to one-third of a cup, depending on how finely you crushed it.Place the dried starter in a bowl with lukewarm water and let it soak until it has completely softened. Then begin feeding it just as you would any other sourdough starter, using equal weights of flour and water. It usually takes two or three feedings before it becomes vigorous enough for baking.For me, this has become the ideal solution. I no longer feel obligated to babysit a sourdough mother every week simply because I own one. Instead, I keep a dried backup in the pantry. If my refrigerated starter dies, gets contaminated, or I simply haven’t baked in months, I can revive it in a couple of days and be right back where I started.An added benefit: I now keep a dehydrated colony of different starters, so I can add a little variety to my baking.Sometimes the simplest solutions really are the best ones.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share via email,  crosspost, or link onto your favorite social media site.ShareThe CamelFor those of you who aren’t nearly as fascinated by bread baking or volunteer pumpkin plants as I am, here’s a little reward: a short video from our trip to Israel.No surprise to anyone that I found a camel to ride…One thing that surprised me was learning that many Bedouin families in Israel still work hard to preserve their traditional way of life. Another discovery? Their obvious appreciation for camels.Really, who could resist climbing aboard a camel in the parking lot of a gas station, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, not too far from the Dead Sea?Apparently, not me.This has now become a running joke in our family. OK… Well... mostly in my head. The question is whether a camel would make a good addition to the farm?Having now ridden one, I have to admit I’m leaning toward “yes.”There are obvious advantages. They eat brush, they’re undeniably entertaining, and camel milk is reputed to have a number of health benefits.So perhaps not justacamel.Perhaps... camels?Since Robert is off today with the delegation touring Israel and attending events on combating antisemitism - which is shockingly running rampant in the Western world, he won’t be editing this Substack or talking me out of any questionable livestock decisions.So I’m taking advantage of his absence.Time for a poll.If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably the kind of person who still enjoys learning how to do things the old-fashioned way. How to bake real bread. How to grow food. How to preserve seeds. How to become just a little less dependent on systems that seem to get a little more fragile every year.That is whatHomesteading for Healthis really about.Every week, I try to share something practical, something we’ve learned through trial and error, and occasionally through spectacular failure. (Fortunately, there are usually stories to go with the failures.)If you enjoy these essays, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscriptions make it possible for us to keep writing, experimenting, researching, filming, and sharing what works, what doesn’t, and sometimes what unexpectedly sprouts out of the compost pile.Subscribe nowThank you for coming along on this adventure. I promise there will almost certainly be more bread, more gardens, more questionable livestock ideas... and probably at least one camel discussion in the future.Finally, ourHomesteading for Healthbook will be available on August 4th!My simple request for those who have or will order copies: please, please, please leave a book review on Amazon! This can’t be done until after the book has shipped, but please remember to do so.  It would be much appreciated by both Robert and me.Robert with the book and Trumpkin the Peacock. The name Trumpkincomes from a fictional character in The Chronicles ofNarnia.Homesteading for HealthJGM

Summary: Pumpkin-Squash


BREAKING--Pericardial Effusions Skyrocketed During Pandemic

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHAs an echocardiographer, I have noticed an increase in significant pericardial effusions (fluid around the heart) since the pandemic started.  This paper caught my attention.📄 Summary: Salvucci et al. (2026) — Echocardiographic Pericardial InvolvementThis retrospective cohort study analyzed1,431 consecutive patientsundergoing routine outpatient echocardiography at an Italian cardiology clinic from 2018 to 2022, comparing pre-pandemic and pandemic periods.The headline finding is stark:pericardial involvement on echo jumped from22.0%(101/459) pre-pandemic to68.8%(463/673) during pandemic years — a more than threefold increase. Multivariable analysis revealed thatSARS-CoV-2 vaccination was independently associated with roughly doubled oddsof pericardial abnormalities (OR 2.08, 95% CI 1.29–3.35, P = 0.003), comparable to the risk from COVID-19 infection itself (OR 1.99, P = 0.012).Critically, the temporal pattern is revealing: odds ratios relative to 2018 were1.86 in 2020, then exploded to6.95 in 2021and6.73 in 2022— precisely when mass vaccination took full effect across the population. The dose-response analysis confirmed one and two doses each independently raised pericardial involvement risk (OR ~2.1), while the interaction analysis showed vaccination and infection operated through overlapping inflammatory pathways.The study captured not just clinical pericarditis butminimal and residual pericardial alterations— small effusions, thickening, hyperechogenicity, fibrinous strands — exactly the kind of subclinical findings that passive surveillance systems miss. The authors themselves note that nearly 70% echo positivity during pandemic years suggests “many cases are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic, escaping passive surveillance.”This is precisely the phenomenonMcCullough, Mead, and Hulscher (2025)characterized in their comprehensive review ofCOVID-19 vaccine-induced subclinical myopericarditis. They described a pathophysiological cascade in which mRNA vaccine-generated spike protein circulates systemically, triggers innate immune activation with CD68+ macrophage infiltration of myocardial and pericardial tissue, and produces low-grade inflammation that falls below the threshold of clinical detection yet is readily apparent on imaging. Their review documented that this subclinical cardiac injury — detectable by echocardiography, cardiac MRI, and elevated troponin — affects a far broader population than the rare cases of fulminant myocarditis captured by VAERS and other passive systems. The Salvucci data, showing nearly 7 in 10 vaccinated patients with echo-detectable pericardial involvement by 2021–2022, provides real-world clinical validation of McCullough’s thesis: what the medical establishment dismissed as “rare and mild” was in fact widespread and simply uninvestigated.Thanks for reading FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™)! This post is public so feel free to share it.SharePlease subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth.AlterAImay be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHPresident, McCullough FoundationFOCAL POINTS has partnered withAlterAIto defend your medical freedom. Subscribe toAlterAItoday and get a discount on unbiased and accurate AI!Sources:Salvucci F, Petrella L, Foroni B, et al. (2026) Association of COVID-19 Infection and SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination With Echocardiographic Pericardial Involvement in a Real-World Outpatient Cohort.Cureus18(7): e113147. doi:10.7759/cureus.113147McCullough PA, Mead MN, Hulscher N. (2025) COVID-19 Vaccine-Induced Subclinical Myopericarditis: Pathophysiology, Diagnosis, and Clinical Management.Medical Research Archives, 13(11). doi:10.18103/mra.v13i11.7078

Summary: Salvucci et al. drop a bombshell: subclinical myopericarditis surged with vaccination rollout, peaking in 2022


Banned by YouTube in 2021, We Were Right About Everything

I just saw the following interview with then YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in which she boasts aboutbanning a million videos from YouTubethat her company and whatever tyrants it was consorting with decided were “dangerous misinformation.”Though I believe that wrath is a cardinal sin and try to resist it, I found her smug, self-assuredness and annoying vocal fry vexing in the extreme.One of the million videos that YouTube banned was my meticulously researched and beautifully shotin-studio interview with Dr. Peter McCullough in May 2021. A few hours after I published it on my YouTube channel, it was unceremoniously deleted with no warning or explanation.I wonder how many salaried employees at YouTube understand how hard it is to make a living as a freelance investigative author, and to organize a studio interview of this quality with ZERO funding and advertising. I didn’t even include myself in the interview or copyright it.Do YouTube executives understand how many years of investigative scholarship and clinical practice went into producing the video’s content?Note that all of Dr. McCullough’s hard-won credentials listed in the opening frame were subsequently stripped and revoked—all becausehe advocated early treatment for COVID-19 using repurposed FDA-approved drugs.The video reveals that—in my intuitions and research, and in Dr. McCullough’s academic expertise and clinical experience — we wereright about everything. Total vindication.Please watch this video and share it with your friends. Also, please make aDONATIONto the McCullough Foundation. We’ve been grinding very hard for the last five years, and together with the valiant Nic Hulscher, we continue to do the investigative scholarship NOT being done by the HHS. We would be extremely grateful for your support.Subscribe nowShare

Summary: Reviewing and republishing my studio interview with Dr. Peter McCullough in May 2021 that was banned by YouTube.


Bill Gates Was Secretly Granted TOP SECRET “Q” Security Clearance by the Department of Energy

byNicolas Hulscher, MPHDuring Anthony Fauci’s recent Senate hearing, Senator Rand Paul exposed a stunning revelation: Bill Gates held a Department of Energy “Q” security clearance from 2014 through 2021.A DOE Q clearance is the equivalent ofTOP SECRETand can establish eligibility to access some of the most sensitive nuclear information held by the United States government.That can include classified material involving nuclear weapons, nuclear materials, atomic-energy programs, intelligence, and national-security information. The clearance does not prove Gates personally reviewed every nuclear secret, but it does mean the federal government determined that he was eligible to receive highly classified nuclear information when authorized.Gates founded and chairsTerraPower, a private nuclear-reactor company developing advanced nuclear technology.However, this was not just any billionaire. Gates has repeatedly promoted population-control policies and has openly discussed reducing the population through vaccines, health programs, and reproductive interventions:Why were America’s nuclear secrets entrusted to a known depopulationist?Nicolas Hulscher, MPHEpidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough FoundationSupport our mission:mcculloughfnd.orgPlease consider following both theMcCullough Foundationandmy personal accountonX(formerly Twitter) for further content.Subscribe now


President Biden's Preemptive Pardon of Fauci

President Biden’s preemptive pardon of Anthony Fauci covered the period fromJanuary 1, 2014, through January 19, 2025.NIH grant R01AI110964, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” was submitted by Peter Daszak as PI/contact PI of EcoHealth Alliance, with Ralph Baric as a key collaborator on June 5, 2013.The proposal was reviewed for theJanuary 2014Council and awarded with a Notice of Award dated May 27, 2014 (project startJune 1, 2014).The administrative pause on federal funding for certain gain-of-function research began inOctober 2014.Even after the administrative pause went into effect, the funding of “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” continued. As part of their research funded by this grant, Baric et al. declared in their 2015 paper inNature Medicinetitled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence”that they had produced a chimeric coronavirus that would infect human airway cells and produce pathogenesisin vivo.As they wrote in theBiosafety and biosecurityclause of their paper:Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279). These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIHIn other words, the NIH allowed them to continue doing their risky Gain-of-Function research (in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology) on the dubious grounds that they had submitted their grant proposalbeforethe pause began. This is the equivalent of telling people that they can drive 70 mph through a school zone, provided they lived in the area and drove the roadbeforethe school was erected.The initial 5-year award for Daszak and Baric ran from June 1, 2014, to May 31, 2019. It was renewed in 2019 (with various intermediate projected end dates such as mid-2024, late 2025, or December 2026 appearing in different records).Funding was suspended in April/May 2020 (later treated as a suspension with conditions) and a modified/reinstated version was awarded in April 2023, with the final project end date listed asApril 30, 2024.The documentary evidence is overwhelming that Anthony Fauci:Knew that Daszak, Baric, et al. were conducting GoF research with their colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (a Chinese biosecurity lab connected with the Chinese military).Knew that Baric et al. were creating SARS coronavirus variants capable of infecting and causing pathogenesis in humans.Knew that the NIH continued to fund (and therefore to endorse) the research of Baric et al. even after the federal pause on GoF in October 2014.Knew that Modernapatented the genetic sequenceof the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site in 2016.Knew that his ownNIAID began collaborating with Moderna in 2016to develop an mRNA vaccine against coronaviruses.NIAID Collaboration with ModernaPrior to the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center and the biotechnology company Moderna had collaborated for four years on mRNA vaccines for other emerging infectious diseases.Knew (documented inhis private email correspondencewith eminent virologists in February 2020) that the genome SARS-CoV-2 displayed clear features of lab manipulation.Fraudulently concealed that SARS-CoV-2 was produced in a lab by directing the publication ofThe proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,authored by the same virologists who had just told him in private that the virus appeared to have come from a lab.All the above is clear documentary evidence that Anthony Fauci was a leading conspirator in perpetrating a massive crime against humanity, fraudulently concealing it, suppressing early treatment for it, and promoting the dangerous, experimental mRNA vaccine that NIAID (of which he was the director) developed with Moderna.I call upon the U.S. Justice Department to challenge President Biden’s preposterous “preemptive pardon” and to prosecute Anthony Fauci for his crimes.If “We the People” let this slide, we will have revealed ourselves to be the most contemptible slaves to the corrupt and tyrannical US federal government.Subscribe nowShare

Summary: Beginning of pardon period precisely coincides with NIH review of Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak's proposal for NIH grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence”


Friday Funnies: "But Things are Different Now"

True story… from 2021Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe video below was made at least 30 years ago.  When SNL was both funny and relevant.It is so cringe-worthy, I couldn’t watch the whole thing. Because after about a minute in, you kind of get the idea. And it hits way too close to home.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.At the time, this all seemed absurd and yet… here we are (or hopefully were…).New Jersey’s “Software Glitch” Was No GlitchThe biggest problem with New Jersey’s so-called“software glitch”is that it wasn’t a glitch. It was a problem; no, it was a deliberately designed system - that some state officials knew about for roughlytwo years.Yet not once during that period did they acknowledge it publicly.For weeks, the public had been told that approximately6,600 non-citizenswere mistakenly registered to vote because of a computer error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission. That explanation was a lie.Here’s what we know. The registrations occurred betweenJune 2023 and June 2024. According to the state, the registration process was changed inJune 2024to prevent it from happening again. Yet the public wasn’t informed untilJuly 2026.Even more troubling, the registrations that had already occurred apparently were left in place after the state says it fixed the problem.  Read that again.  After the registration process stopped allowing non-citizens to be added to the voter rolls, the state did not remove these registrations already added to the system. These people were allowed to vote.Think about what that means.Someone knew enough to change the system.Someone knew enough to stop the registrations.But no one thought it important enough to tell the public, county election officials, or the Legislature that thousands of self-identified non-citizens who expressed that they desired to vote had already been added to the voter rolls.AND no one in the NJ government thought it important enough to remove the non-citizens already added to the voter registration system???It also turns out that New Jersey’s own contractor disputes the state’s explanation.Governor Mikie Sherrill has blamed IDEMIA, the company that operates the MVC registration system. That turns out to be a “fabrication” by the governor.IDEMIA says its software correctly recorded applicants who answered “No” when asked whether they were U.S. citizens. The company says the state still allowed those same applicants to continue through the voter registration workflow if they answered “Yes” when asked whether they wished to register. According to IDEMIA, New Jersey did not request a software change to stop that process until June 2024.If IDEMIA is correct, computers didn’t suddenly malfunction. The system did exactly what it had been designed to do.That raises an uncomfortable fact.Why was the system designed to allow someone who had already declared they werenot a U.S. citizento continue into voter registration?Even more troubling, why were the registrations that had already occurred apparently left in place after the state says it fixed the problem?Officials now acknowledge that hundreds of those registrants later cast ballots before the issue became public. That alone should have triggered immediate disclosure.And there is another reason to be skeptical of the official narrative.The figure of 6,600 non-citizens who want to vote and then were registered in New Jersey to vote is not the final number.Several Republican officials involved in reviewing the matter have publicly stated they believe additional registrations could be identified as investigations continue. The public deserves to know the full scope of the problem, not simply the first number released.Calling this a “software glitch” suggests an unforeseeable technical accident. This was no accident.The questions investigators and the public should be asking are no longer about software. They are about who knew, when they knew it, why the public wasn’t told, and whether the number released so far is the whole story.Of course, the question remains - what other design flaws are buried deep into the voter computer software in other blue states?Two years later… the same actor.Cause its all about him (clicks, likes, follows, and … monetization)and here we go again…But things are different now <insert sarcasm>JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.