The Beagles Won

There was a line item on the invoice. That’s the detail that still does the work, four years later, when you try to explain to someone why this issue went nuclear.Cordectomy. Surgical severing of vocal cords.A federal agency, your tax dollars, my tax dollars,, paid a contractor to slit the vocal cords of forty-four beagle puppies, six to eight months old, so that the experimenters wouldn’t have to listen to them cry while being force-fed an experimental drug for weeks until they were killed and dissected.The American Veterinary Medical Association opposes the procedure. So does the American Animal Hospital Association. It is the kind of thing veterinarians refuse to do to a family pet absent extraordinary medical justification. But for the convenience of a research lab, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Anthony Fauci wrote the check. $1.68 million, total. The cordectomy was a separate billable line.When the documents came out in late 2021; pried loose by FOIA requests from a small watchdog group called the White Coat Waste Project, the public reaction was not partisan. It was visceral. Republican Representative Nancy Mace organized a bipartisan letter signed by twenty-four members of Congress demanding answers. Senator Joni Ernst started turning the screws from her side. PETA filed lawsuits. And a Beltway press corps that had spent two years treating Dr. Fauci as a secular saint suddenly found itself trying to explain “BeagleGate” to a furious country.Some of what went viral turned out to be wrong. The most notorious image, beagles with their heads sealed in mesh cages full of sand flies, from a Tunisian leishmaniasis study, was misattributed; the journal eventually issued a correction stating that NIH had not funded that particular paper. The watchdogs got out over their skis on that one, and the fact-checkers gleefully pointed it out.But the cordectomies were real. The University of Georgia study, where 28 healthy adult beagles were intentionally infested with parasite-carrying flies and then killed at the end, that was real.The intramural sepsis experiments at NIH’s own Bethesda campus, where dogs had bacteria pumped into their lungs and were allowed to suffer through septic shock for up to 96 hours before euthanasia, going back to 1986, that was real, and it had been going on for decades. Over two thousand beagles, by the watchdogs’ count, in that single program.Here is the thing about a moral catastrophe that has been quietly funded for forty years: when daylight finally hits it, the question is not whether to defend it. The question is who will move first to end it.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe settled consensus, and why it was never quite as settled as it lookedFor most of the lifetime of anyone reading this, American biomedical research has operated on a presumption so deeply baked into the system that scientists barely articulated it: before a drug or biologic goes into a human, it goes into animals. Typically, a rodent species (mice, rats) and a non-rodent mammal, usually a dog, usually a beagle, because beagles are small, docile, and physiologically well-characterized. This was not a policy preference. It was federal law, traceable to the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act passed in the aftermath of an elixir-of-sulfanilamide poisoning that killed more than a hundred people, mostly children. The post-thalidomide reforms of the 1960s reinforced it.The logic was straightforward: better a beagle than a baby. Given a choice between the two, almost any honest person picks the beagle. And so for decades, when an animal-rights group raised objections, the response from the scientific establishment was essentially:do you want children to die?The trouble is that this framing, beagle versus baby, was never quite an honest description of what the research enterprise actually does. The honest description is closer to this: more than ninety percent of drugs that successfully pass animal trials still fail in humans. The animal-to-human pipeline leaks badly. Inbred mouse strains share 98.6% of their genetics with each other; immortalized cell lines share 99.9%. Cancer gets cured in mice on a quarterly basis. Alzheimer’s gets cured in mice with such regularity that it has become a running joke among researchers. None of it translates. The mice were never the bottleneck. The mice were the comfortable, familiar, institutionally entrenched stand-in for actual answers about actual humans.This is not a fringe critique. It is the FDA's official position as of 2025, under Commissioner Marty Makary. It is the official position of the NIH, as of 2025, under Director Jay Bhattacharya. And it is now the basis for the most significant change in federal biomedical research policy in eighty years.What just happened, in plain EnglishThe story has three acts.Act Onewas Congress, getting there first. In December 2022, quietly, with bipartisan unanimous consent in the Senate, co-authored by Cory Booker on the left and Rand Paul on the right, Congress passed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0. It amended the 1938 law. For the first time since FDR’s second term, sponsors of new drugs were explicitly authorized to use non-animal alternatives: cell-based assays, computer models, organ-on-a-chip systems, in their submissions to the FDA. The Act did not ban animal testing. It made the alternatives legal. That was the door opening.Act Twowas the FDA walking through it. In April 2025, the agency released a “Roadmap to Reducing Animal Testing in Preclinical Safety Studies.” The roadmap set actual timelines, not aspirational language, for phasing out animal testing wherever validated alternatives exist. It started with monoclonal antibodies, the class of biologic drugs for which animal models (especially monkeys) are known to be particularly lousy predictors of human response. By year one, the agency had qualified its first AI-based drug development tool, updated guidance to spare more than a million horseshoe crabs annually from endotoxin testing, and built a searchable database telling drug developers where alternatives are now acceptable. Makary’s stated goal: make animal research “the exception rather than the norm” within three to five years.Act Threewas the NIH, three weeks later, doing the same thing for federally funded research. Bhattacharya created a new office, the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application, ORIVA, to coordinate the shift. By July 2025, NIH stopped funding new grant applications that proposedonlyanimal research. Every new project has to address non-animal alternatives. And shortly afterward, NIH closed the last in-house beagle laboratory on the Bethesda campus. The sepsis program ended. PETA sent flowers,  a sentence I never expected to write about a sitting NIH director.The coalition that pushed this across the line is genuinely strange. PETA and Elon Musk on the same side of a policy fight is not something the polling data predicted. Joni Ernst and Cory Booker co-sponsoring legislation that actually passes is not a typical Tuesday in Washington. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine cheering an NIH director appointed by Donald Trump is the kind of thing that makes pundits stare at their notes, wondering what happened to the axis they were supposed to plot the story along.What happened is that, on this question, the left-right axis was never the right one. The right axis is institutional capture versus institutional accountability. And on that axis, the coalition lines up exactly as you would expect: the people who had been getting away with cordectomies for forty years lined up on one side, and everybody else lined up on the other.The honest counterargument.I want to be careful here, because the version of this story that says “the government was torturing puppies and a brave new administration stopped it” is true as far as it goes, but it also flatters certain political instincts without telling the whole picture. The whole picture includes some serious scientists who think the pendulum is now swinging too fast.Arnold Kriegstein at UCSF, a neuroscientist who served on an NIH commission studying alternative models, has used the word “disaster” to describe what could happen if neuroscience research is pushed prematurely off animal models. There are things mouse brains and primate brains do: actual cognition, actual circuit-level processing, actual behavioral output, that no organoid in a dish can yet replicate. Organoids are, in the words of the scientists who pioneered them, “simplified versions of real organs.” They have no blood supply. They lack immune cells. They are powerful tools, but not yet substitutes for what they model.The same caveat applies, with extra weight, to biodefense and pandemic preparedness research. If we want to know whether a vaccine will work against a novel airborne pathogen with pandemic potential, we eventually need to know whether it works in a whole animal with a functioning immune system, a functioning respiratory tract, and an observable disease course. There is no in vitro model for “did the ferret survive being challenged with H5N1?” You can model parts of it. You can’t model all of it. Not yet.Notably, more than 111 million mice and rats are estimated to be used annually in U.S. biomedical research (ref). Recent totals for non-rodent mammals are around 774,000–850,000 animals annually, which includes dogs, cats, primates, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, pigs, sheep, and other mammals (ref). Having worked in biomedical research, I can write with absolute certainty that 95% of what passes for scientific research involving animal models isn’t worth the time and resources spent on it. Mice lie, monkeys mislead, and the only thing that predicts safety and efficacy in humans is safety and efficacy in humans.And there is a legitimate worry, voiced by researchers across the political spectrum, that the NIH has not yet defined, with sufficient precision, what counts as an acceptable “new approach methodology” in grant review. If your study genuinely requires a mouse and you cannot get funded without invoking some not-yet-validated alternative, you are not advancing the science. You are doing paperwork theater.These objections deserve to be taken seriously, and the honest version of this story does so. The MAHA reader who wants to win this argument on the merits, not just on tribal affiliation, needs to understand and engage in dialogue about these objections.But here is the thing. None of these objections justifies cordectomies on beagle puppies. None of these objections justify forty years of septic-shock experiments that did not produce a sepsis cure. None of them justify the institutional inertia that kept the system, by default, running on the most morally costly version of itself long after better tools became available. The honest counterargument is an argument forprudencein the transition, not for the indefinite preservation of practices that, exposed to sunlight, almost no one is willing to publicly defend.What this is really about.If you read the policy documents carefully, you notice that the federal agencies have stopped making the old argument. The old argument was that animal research is uncomfortable but necessary, and that the alternatives are not yet good enough. The new argument is: animal research often does not work, the alternatives are increasingly good enough, and the old system was preserved past its scientific usefulness by inertia and by the regulatory comfort of doing things the way they have always been done.That is a remarkable concession for a federal agency to make. It is, in effect, an admission that institutional capture is a real phenomenon, that “the science” can be wrong for decades at a time, and that course correction sometimes requires outsiders shouting at the gates. It is the kind of concession that, if you are MAHA-curious, you have been waiting a long time to hear from the federal health establishment.It is also a concession that should make all of us a little humble about the certainty with which other federally blessed scientific consensuses are sometimes communicated. If a beagle program could run for forty years past its sell-by date, hidden behind locked doors and FOIA-redacted documents, what else is running on inertia? What else is being defended on the grounds that the experts said so, where the experts are themselves the people who built and benefit from the system being defended?This is the question the cordectomy invoice forces. It is a more uncomfortable question than the one about the dogs, although the dogs are the reason we are asking it. The dogs got us in the door. What we found, once inside, was an enterprise that had stopped asking itself the basic question every research program is supposed to ask continuously:Is this still the best way to do this, or is it just the way we have always done it?The beagles did not win in the end because they were cute, though they were. They won because the institutional defense of what was being done to them collapsed the moment it had to be made in public, in plain language, to ordinary people. A research program that cannot survive being described accurately to the citizens funding it is not a research program. It is a habit.The habit is breaking. The question now is which other habits should break next, and whether the same coalition that broke this one has the discipline to ask that question carefully, with humility about what it does not know, rather than as the opening move in a wider war on expertise it does not trouble to understand.Worth watching.If you found this useful, consider subscribing. we write about institutional accountability, biomedical policy, and the strange political coalitions that occasionally crack open settled assumptions.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: How a strange bipartisan coalition broke the eighty-year consensus on animal research — and why even skeptics should pay attention


Friday Funnies: The Same Old Washington Thune

John Thune represents the species we thought MAGA had already chased out of Washington: the perfectly groomed, donor-approved, country-club Republican who always has a very serious reason why nothing can actually be done.Thune feels like Mitch McConnell rebooted with better lighting, a decent chin, and fewer visible signs of decay.What we want is a fighter; what we keep getting from the Senate is a rotating cast of parliamentary therapists explaining why now is not the right time to save the country.The illegal immigrant problem isn’t solved. The bureaucracy is out of control. The intelligence agencies act as they report to themselves. The health of America continues to decline. MAHA issues are ignored. Big pharma and big ag continue to run roughshod. And the national debt grows larger.Yet the RINO Senate Republicans respond the way an HOA board handles a dispute over mailbox paint colors“We share your concerns.”“We’re monitoring the situation closely.”“We must respect Senate norms.”Conservatives are done with “norms.” They watched Democrats spend years bulldozing every institutional tradition in sight like drunken contractors driving a rented excavator, while Republicans stood nearby holding a laminated copy of Robert’s Rules of Order.Every time conservatives demand action, a Senate Republican emerges from a mahogany-paneled office whispering about the filibuster like it’s the Shroud of Turin.“Oh dear,” they sigh, clutching pearls and Senate procedure manuals, “we simply cannot deport illegal immigrants because subsection B, paragraph 4 of Senate precedent from 1978 may be offended.”Meanwhile, Democrats govern like they’re trying to speedrun the collapse of the republic.The Republican base isn’t amused.That’s why the term RINO has exploded again. Republican In Name Only. Although many conservatives now joke that it really means:“Retreat Is Now Official.”Or:“Republicans Ignoring Normal Americans.”Or perhaps most accurately:“Republicans Incapable of Not Surrendering.”Trump changed the Republican Party permanently, and a lot of Senate Republicans still haven’t realized the old game is over. They still want to sit in the back rooms with the lobbyists and their democrat friends and work out deals that better their own pocketbooks, rather than that of the American people.  Then pretend that they are actually doing something to help America. While in fact, they do nothing.Despite the avalanche of executive orders coming out of the Trump White House, only a handful have actually made it through Congress and become law.  Turning executive orders into actual legislation requires Congress to do something it increasingly avoids: move with purpose.Trump governs with Sharpies because Congress operates like a retirement committee trapped in a never-ending lunch recess. The result is that major policy changes remain temporary, vulnerable to the next president with a pen, a phone, and a grudge.The new Republican base is populist, anti-globalist, anti-bureaucratic, suspicious of the intelligence apparatus, and deeply angry after COVID, censorship, lockdowns, inflation, and years of being lied to by people with Ivy League credentials and emotional support dogs - otherwise known as staffers and lobbyists.Voters want confrontation. They want investigations. They want accountability. They want action on MAHA issues. They want somebody in Washington who behaves like they understand the country is on fire.At the top of the dumpster fire, we have our fearless leader, Senator John Thune.  Designated the Majority Leader, but championing the status quo of a broken system.John Thune has become the embodiment of the modern Republican problem: a party that campaigns like rebels and governs like risk managers. While Trump floods the zone with executive orders trying to force change through a broken system, Congress, under Republican leadership, struggles to convert ANY of those actions into durable law.Voters sent Republicans to Washington expecting a counterrevolution against the administrative state, not a seminar on Senate etiquette delivered by well-compensated career politicians whose personal fortunes quietly rose while the country declined.Thune now owns this mess. He sits atop a Senate Republican establishment that too often looks less like a governing majority and more like a support group for cautious institutionalists terrified of their own voters.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.“You’re having a fake seizure”“No I’m not”The comment that “These are the people calling you a bigot and a nazi online.” is on target and maybe why this video  is funny and yet so pathetic…Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareJGM

Summary: Marching to McConnell’s tune


Fearporn and New Prep Act Declaration

Over the last several weeks, headlines and social media influencers have been whipping themselves into a frenzy over the Andes strain hantavirus outbreak tied to the M/VHondiuscruise ship. A handful of infected passengers, concerns about secondary spread, and suddenly the internet is acting like we are five minutes away from “COVID 2.0: Rodent Boogaloo.”Now comes the latest source of panic from the health freedom movement: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has issued a PREP Act declaration tied to the outbreak, and the usual suspects immediately began screaming that dictatorship is imminent.The fear is that this PREP Act Declaration is paving the way for a new mRNA vaccine. That Secretary Kennedy has been coopted by evil forces.Slow down.ThisPREP Act declarationdoes not mention vaccines at all. What it actually does is create liability protections surrounding the investigational use of favipiravir, an antiviral drug that has shown potential activity against RNA viruses.So - it's hard to read the outrage on Twitter, without getting annoyed… cause…Kennedy just doesn’t need this kind of outrage from our side directed at him over this.It is unfortunate that the meme claiming this PREP Act was secretly about a new mRNA vaccine spread virally, without people actually reading the document.The BackstoryFirst, let’s talk about what the PREP Act actually is, because most of the people hyperventilating online clearly have not read it. The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act was passed in 2005 during the Bush administration as part of the post-9/11 biodefense era. Dick Cheney’s “1% Doctrine” years gave us a sprawling security architecture built around the assumption that if there was even a 1% chance of a catastrophic biological threat, the federal government should prepare for it as if it were certain. That mentality helped create everything from stockpile programs to emergency countermeasure frameworks to liability shields for pharmaceutical products. There is no question that the PREP Act is an abomination that Congress needs either to heavily modify or rescind. But that is an essay for a different day.The PREP Act is essentially a legal mechanism that allows the federal government to provide liability protection for designated medical countermeasures during a declared emergency or credible threat. In plain English, it protects companies, hospitals, physicians, and distributors from being sued into oblivion if they deploy approved or investigational treatments during an emergency response.It was heavily used during COVID, which understandably leaves many Americans deeply suspicious whenever they hear the phrase “PREP Act declaration.” Given what this country went through, that skepticism is earned.But here is the important point. Not every PREP Act declaration is the same thing as declaring medical martial law.If you actually read the new declaration, what Kennedy issued is remarkably narrow. It is specifically tied to the Andes virus outbreak associated with the M/VHondiusincident and close contacts linked to that chain of transmission.The declaration does not authorize lockdowns. It does not authorize mask mandates. It does not suspend civil liberties. It does not create a vaccine mandate. It does not authorize the development of a vaccine. It does not declare a national public health emergency. There are no FEMA camps hiding behind the shrubbery waiting to abduct your Labrador retriever.What it actually does is far more mundane. It creates liability protection surrounding the investigational use of favipiravir, an antiviral drug that has shown potential activity against RNA viruses and is now being positioned as a possible treatment option for Andes virus-associated hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. The declaration explicitly acknowledges that there are currently no FDA approved vaccines and no FDA approved antiviral drugs for this condition. In other words, the government is trying to create enough legal clarity that doctors can attempt treatment without every institution involved immediately summoning a battalion of corporate attorneys billing $900 an hour to explain why nobody should touch the patient.Andes virus is also not your standard North American hantavirus. Most hantavirus infections in the Americas are associated with rodent exposure and are not considered readily transmissible between humans. Andes virus has long been treated differently because evidence exists for limited person-to-person spread under conditions of close contact. That is precisely why this outbreak attracted so much attention. The administration would have been condemned as negligent if it ignored the event entirely, particularly after years of being told by the public health establishment that governments must “act early.”So now Kennedy is caught in the familiar Washington funhouse mirror. If government does nothing, it is accused of incompetence. If it creates a narrow legal framework for investigational treatment during a contained outbreak, critics immediately scream that fascism has arrived wearing an HHS badge and carrying a clipboard.Ironically, this declaration is far more restrained than many of the emergency actions Americans witnessed during COVID. Kennedy is just using the tools at his disposal to initiate antiviral therapy. Which most likely to be given to very few people, as the RO for endemic hantaviruses in the USA is zero. It is contracted by handling rodents or their waste.There is no massive nationwide deployment campaign here. No attempt to regulate every aspect of private life. No endless stream of contradictory “expert guidance” about whether your Thanksgiving turkey is a bioterror threat or whether you are allowed to entertain in your own home.This is a limited liability framework attached to a specific outbreak involving a virus that, unlike most hantaviruses, actually does raise legitimate concerns about close-contact transmission - in the specific case of the Andes strain and a small, close-quartered ship.Reasonable people can absolutely debate whether the PREP Act itself grants too much liability protection. That is a fair argument. But if such authority exists on the books, this is actually one of the more rational and limited uses of it we have seen in years. Kennedy appears to be trying to thread a very difficult needle: allowing clinicians enough flexibility to respond to a potentially dangerous outbreak while avoiding the sprawling authoritarian excesses that destroyed public trust during COVID.Frankly, compared to what Americans lived through in 2020 and 2021, this declaration barely rises above the level of bureaucratic housekeeping with lawyers attached. Which, in Washington, may actually count as progress.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.SharePost Script:Sec. Kennedy’s Press office needs to do a whole lot better.  They could have saved themselves a whole lot of negative press by stating just what this declaration is and isn’t. Why wasn’t it made clear that this PREP Act Declaration was limited in scope and focus? Clarity from a communications office should be a no-brainer. Isn’t this what they are trained to do?A press office operating in 2026 should understand that an unexplained declaration doesn’t stay unexplained; the vacuum gets filled, and it gets filled by whatever is most shareable.

Summary: Let's get real


Lies My Government Told Me: Updated

“Lies My Government Told Me, and The Better Future Coming” can still be purchased viaAmazonor other booksellers.The short versionHere is the argument in plain English, so you know where this is going.During COVID, public health officials repeatedly spoke with absolute certainty about things they were, in reality, guessing at. Time and again, they chose the most alarming number instead of the most honest one, the most dramatic framing instead of the most grounded. And they delivered those claims with the full weight and authority of government behind them.When people pointed out the holes, they were mocked, censored, throttled on social media, stripped of professional standing, pushed out of jobs, and in some cases driven out of the very agencies they had served. Then, when the claims started falling apart, the corrections arrived late, quietly, and usually without apology.This is not the story of one giant lie. It is the story of a pattern. A habit. Manufacture certainty. Punish dissent. Revise the record later, once the public has moved on.What follows is a brief tour through the evidence: a fatality estimate that seemed to change depending on who was asking the question, a vaccine statistic selected because it sounded more impressive than it actually was, a six-foot distancing rule nobody can produce real science for, a drafted warning about heart inflammation that was quietly shelved, and a more sophisticated vaccine safety monitoring system the FDA had access to but chose not to use. Add to that the court records and internal government emails showing officials pressuring social media companies to suppress dissent and “manage” inconvenient voices online.None of this requires belief in some grand conspiracy. It only requires comparing what these officials said privately with what they said publicly. The gap between those two things reveals just how badly people were duped.And I will be honest about the other side too, because doing otherwise would be committing the exact same sin I am describing here. Some critics got things wrong. Some overreached. Some made claims that did not hold up either. The issue is not whether one tribe was perfectly right and the other perfectly wrong.The issue is that the institutions we were told to trust broke the most basic covenant with the public: tell people the truth, including the parts they are uncertain about, and allow open debate instead of crushing it.Let me show you what happened.Two numbers, two audiences, eleven daysStart with the cleanest example, because it captures the whole pattern in miniature. In early 2020, Anthony Fauci, then the most trusted health voice in the country, described how deadly the new virus was. He did it twice, to two different audiences, eleven days apart. The two descriptions are difficult to reconcile, which is a polite way of saying they don’t match.First, the doctors.On February 28, 2020, Fauci and two colleagues wrote an article in theNew England Journal of Medicine, the most respected medical journal in America. Talking to fellow physicians, they were cautious. If the real number of infections was much higher than the confirmed cases, they wrote, which they expected, then the death rate “may be considerably less than 1%.” They even said the virus might end up “more akin to” a severe flu season.1Notice the hedging: may be, might end up, more akin to. That is how careful people talk when they do not yet know. Fair enough. The virus was barely two months old.Then, the public.Eleven days later, on March 11, Fauci testified before Congress on national television. The hedging was gone. He told the country that the flu kills about 0.1 percent of the people it infects, and that this virus was “ten times” more deadly than that.2Ten times deadlier than the flu. No “may be.” No “less than 1%.” Just a clean, terrifying number that ran on every front page in the country. So, which was it? Privately, to the experts, “probably milder than it looks.” Publicly, to everyone else, “ten times the flu.” Same man, same week, two very different messages aimed at two very different rooms.And the scary number had a flaw baked into it.That “ten times” claim compared the new virus to the flu’s 0.1 percent. But a later peer-reviewed analysis caught the problem: the flu’s 0.1 percent counts deaths againsteveryoneinfected, including the millions who barely notice it. The COVID numbers being thrown around counted deaths againstconfirmedcases only, which skews sicker. He was comparing two different things and calling it one. Do that, and the new virus automatically looks worse than a fair, apples-to-apples comparison would show. The cautious journal version had quietly avoided this trap. The scary public version walked right into it.3The public got a hard, simple “ten times.” The experts got “may be considerably less than 1%.” If the real worry was the math of mass spread of a virus slightly worse than the flu, then that is what the public deserved to hear, in plain words. Instead, they got a number built to frighten. The confidence got dialed up or down depending on who was listening. That is the whole pattern, and it happened in a single week, from a single person, in his own words. Fauci’s strategy was a confidence game.The same trick, pointed the other way.Here is why that example matters so much: the same move appears again later, except this time it makes the vaccine look better rather than the virus look worse. You have heard the vaccines were “95% effective.”That 95% is arelativenumber. It means the vaccinated group got sick about 95% less often than the unvaccinated group during the trial. But because hardly anyone in either group got sick during that short window, theabsolutechange in your personal odds, the number that answers “how much does this actually lower my chance of getting sick right now,” was about eight-tenths of one percent. Both numbers are real. They answered different questions, but only the more impressive ones were put before the public.21I want to be just as fair here as I was with Fauci, because this one is close but not identical. Reporting the relative number has long been the typical way to describe a vaccine trial, not some COVID-era invention. So, this was not a flat-out math error like the flu comparison was.The fair complaint, and it was made at the time by researchers in The Lancet and the BMJ (both of which actually supported vaccination) is simpler: show people both numbers. Let them see how strong the protection isandhow big the underlying risk was to begin with. That second number mattered because it fed straight into the bigger fights this essay gets to later, about how far the government should have gone in pushing and eventually mandating the shot.Put the two side by side, and the real problem comes into view. One number made the virus appear more dangerous. The other made the vaccine appear more effective. Neither was fabricated. In both cases, someone reached for the more dramatic of the two honest numbers and didn’t mention the more conservative one.If the bias ran in random directions, it would be an unremarkable error. But it ran in the same direction every time: toward more fear of the disease and more confidence in the cure. That consistency is what separates an honest mistake from a thumb on the scale.It happened over and overOnce you spot the move, you see it everywhere. There is a real unknown. Behind closed doors, people know it is an unknown. But the version that reaches the public drops the hedges and hands you a flat rule, a hard number, or a firm promise. Then the facts shift, and the walk-back never gets the same volume as the original claim.The six-foot rule.For two years, the six-foot rule ran American life: the stickers on the supermarket floor, the spaced-out school desks, the half-empty restaurants. It felt like hard science. Then, in 2024, under congressional questioning, Fauci said the six-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and admitted he knew of no study behind that specific distance. A rule that reorganized daily life for tens of millions of people had, by the account of the man most associated with it, simply turned up one day, fully formed, like a foundling on the doorstep. To be fair, the rule came from the CDC, not from Fauci personally, and he never claimed to have invented it. But that is a thin defense. A rule sold to the public as settled science turned out to have almost no science underneath it.4“The vaccines stop you from spreading it.”In 2021, senior officials said flatly that vaccinated people did not catch or pass on the virus. This was not a throwaway line. It was the whole logic behind the mandates and the vaccine passports: if the vaccinated could not spread it, then the unvaccinated were a threat to everyone else, and you could justify forcing the issue. Even worse, the president of the United States went even further, stating:“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” -Biden, July 2021“If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.” -Biden, December, 2021.Except it was not true. The vaccines did cut severe illness and death (probably in part due to IgG4 class switching), which is genuinely important - particularly for the elderly with limited immunological function, but they did not reliably stop infection or transmission, and that was clear to the mainstream by late 2021. This was a huge coercive machine that was built on lies.5“Two weeks to flatten the curve.”For about two weeks, this slogan was honest, which, by the standards of the period, was a respectable run. The original idea, spelled out plainly at the time, was about hospital capacity: slow the spread so that, even if the same number of people eventually got infected, it would happen gradually rather than all at once, and the hospitals would not collapse. It was a timing plan. This strategy openly admitted that roughly the same number of people would ultimately catch the virus.6The dishonesty was not in the science. It was in the deadline. “Two weeks” sounded like a specific, limited request. It was not limited at all. The real goal quietly slid from “do not overwhelm the hospitals” to “keep this locked down indefinitely,” and nobody ever told the public the deal had changed. People signed up for one thing and got another. The lockdowns in some instances lasted for months or even years.COVID-era lockdowns and economic disruptions that they caused pushed roughly 100–150 million additional people into hunger/undernourishment globally. The UN estimated global hunger rose by about 118 million people in 2020 and by about 150 million since the outbreak of COVID-19 by 2021. Africa had about 282 million undernourished people in 2020, roughly 21% of the continent. These are not small numbers.During COVID, children paid a staggering price for policies public health officials labeled as “following the science.” Prolonged school closures caused massive learning loss, especially among poor and working-class children who lacked tutors, stable internet, or parents at home. Math and reading scores fell sharply across the United States and much of the world, while rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, obesity, and behavioral problems climbed. At the same time, young children were forced to spend critical developmental years staring at masked faces, despite remarkably weak evidence, as in no evidence, that masking children, particularly with cloth masks in school settings, meaningfully reduced transmission of the disease. Teachers know that children learn language, emotional cues, trust, and social interaction by watching faces. Instead, the government normalized fear, isolation, and silence in classrooms for years while imposing measures that showed no benefit for children themselves, who were already at very low risk from severe COVID illness. The long-term educational and psychological consequences of these policies may outlast the virus itself.The “conspiracy theory” that was not. Perhaps the most damaging move of all was the effort to brand the lab-leak hypothesis as a “debunked conspiracy theory” almost from the start. In early 2020, a statement published in The Lancet and signed by 27 scientists condemned what it called “conspiracy theories” about the virus’s origin, while presenting the natural-origin explanation as essentially settled science. It worked. For a long time, the discussion was effectively shut down.Then the emails emerged. The statement had been organized and drafted by the head of EcoHealth Alliance, an organization with a direct financial stake in the outcome because it had funded coronavirus research involving the very lab under scrutiny. Efforts were reportedly made to present the letter as the independent judgment of neutral scientists, without obvious ties back to the people involved. Some collaborators even chose not to sign specifically to avoid the appearance of self-interest.Today, the lab-leak hypothesis is treated as a legitimate possibility by multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, and the CIA now says it leans toward a laboratory origin. Recent whistleblower testimony and congressional investigations have further undermined the claim that the issue was ever “settled science. A genuine open scientific question was publicly framed as closed by people with a stake in the answer, and those who continued asking questions were smeared, censored, or dismissed as cranks .89The role of senior U.S. public health officials, particularly Anthony Fauci, is again nefarious. Released emails showed that, early on, several scientists privately raised concerns with Fauci and others that the virus could have originated from laboratory research. Yet within weeks, the public messaging hardened around the claim that a natural origin was effectively settled science. Fauci repeatedly cited papers such as “Proximal Origin” as evidence against a lab leak, even though internal communications later suggested the authors themselves initially viewed the issue as uncertain.  As the NIH had funded the research in China and even helped design the experiments, the decision to hide the lab leak theory reeks of a cover-up. The problem was not a scientific debate. The problem was presenting uncertainty as certainty while quietly working to marginalize dissenting views.The silencing was the heart of itEverything so far could just be a story about a government getting things wrong under pressure, which happens, if not for one thing. The people who caught these problems as they were happening were silenced. That is the part the first edition of this book was really about, and it is the part the record now backs up.This is not a hunch anymore. In the case that becameMurthy v. Missouri, a federal judge reviewed an extensive record of internal documents and found that government officials had likely “coerced” or “significantly encouraged” social media companies into suppressing views the government disfavored, to the point that the companies’ decisions could fairly be attributed to the government itself. An appeals court largely agreed. The Supreme Court then dismissed the case on narrow procedural grounds: it ruled that these plaintiffs could not establish the standing required to sue, and it pointedly declined to rule on whether the underlying conduct was constitutional.10That distinction was widely lost, and the ruling was reported as an exoneration. It was nothing of the kind. The Court did not find that the government had behaved properly. It found that the wrong parties had brought the suit. The factual record of the pressure campaign, much of it drawn from the government’s own emails, remains intact. The Supreme Court’s own majority opinion describes White House officials publicly and privately pressing the platforms to do more about “misinformation,” and notes that the Surgeon General, the CDC, the FBI, and the federal cybersecurity agency were all in contact with the platforms about what to remove.11This is precisely the arrangement the first edition warned about. The government never had to arrest anyone. It only had to lean on the handful of private companies that now control most of the public conversation, and let them do the silencing. What made the arrangement so effective, from the government’s standpoint, was its deniability. Officials could call it “flagging,” a word doing an extraordinary amount of work, while doctors, scientists, and ordinary citizens who questioned the six-foot rule, or natural immunity, or the transmission claims, the very things later quietly conceded to be shaky, found themselves throttled, labeled, or removed from the platforms altogether.And here is the trap, the part that makes it a closed loop. The official line is called settled science. Anything that disagrees with settled science is, by definition, misinformation. Misinformation can be removed. So, the disagreement gets removed, the official line goes unchallenged, and it keeps looking settled. Round and round. The censorship did not just sit next to the false certainty. It was the thing that kept the false certainty alive by killing off the corrections before they could land.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.A case study: the heart problem they chose to ignoreIf you want the clearest example of how this worked, look at myocarditis, the heart inflammation now officially recognized as a risk of the mRNA vaccines, particularly in young men.Start with what was knowable early. Israel launched mass vaccination in December 2020, and after reports of heart inflammation began appearing, its Ministry of Health started actively tracking myocarditis cases in February 2021. That timeline is documented in the New England Journal of Medicine itself. Israeli officials also alerted their American counterparts that same month about a concerning signal in younger vaccine recipients.Now compare that to what the American public was told. On April 27, 2021, the CDC director stood at a White House briefing and claimed “we have not seen” reports suggesting vaccine-related myocarditis. But internally, by the end of March, the CDC had already accumulated well over a hundred myocarditis reports in VAERS, along with additional reports in a second federal monitoring system. The public statement and the internal data did not match.Then came the CDC’s own paper trail. On May 17, 2021, the agency’s vaccine safety work group acknowledged in publicly archived meeting materials that myocarditis cases were clustering in young men, typically after the second dose and usually within days of vaccination, while still insisting the rate remained within the expected range. But one week later, on May 24, the language changed in a way that could no longer be spun away: the CDC’s own documents stated there was “a higher number of observed than expected” myocarditis cases among 16-to-24-year-olds. By late May, the agency had internally acknowledged the signal in its own words.According to records later described in a 2024 congressional investigation, the CDC even drafted a formal Health Alert Network warning, its official mechanism for urgent public-health alerts, to notify physicians and the public about the myocarditis risk. The CDC director reportedly received that draft on May 23. The alert was never issued in that form. Instead, the first public acknowledgment came days later, on May 27, wrapped in carefully reassuring language, roughly three months after Israel first raised concerns and after American reports had already accumulated. The World Health Organization formally recognized the myocarditis signal in July.What makes this episode so troubling is not simply that myocarditis occurred. It is the pattern. Flat public denials while reports were already piling up internally. Private acknowledgment of the problem weeks before clear public disclosure. A drafted warning that was quietly shelved. And a months-long gap between the first international alarm and the first straightforward admission to the American people.During that gap, physicians, parents, and researchers raising the exact concern the CDC was privately investigating were dismissed as alarmists or branded as “misinformation” spreaders.  They were censored on line. Licenses were threatened. Yet today, myocarditis is listed in the FDA-required safety warnings for these products. The people warning about it early were not inventing the signal. They were simply ahead of the official narrative.The better tool they left on the shelfThe heart-inflammation story raises an obvious question. If we had early-warning systems, why did they keep failing to go off? A congressional investigation released in 2026 offers a partial answer, and a disturbing one. Note that these findings are investigational, not settled facts.It centers on Dr. Ana Szarfman, a longtime FDA medical officer who helped build the agency’s safety monitoring system (with who I actively collaborated from 2020 to 2023), and Dr. William DuMouchel, the statistician who designed the mathematics behind it. The technical issue is real and predates COVID. The FDA’s standard tool has a known blind spot called “masking”: when one product generates a very large number of reports for a given side effect, the math can hide that same side effect for other products. DuMouchel had built a better method specifically to correct for this. On March 1, 2021, Szarfman presented it to FDA leadership as a state-of-the-art upgrade.According to the report, when the better method was run on the COVID vaccine data, it produced what one analysis called “49 examples of extreme masking,” (masking in this case does not refer to things you wear on your face, but rather the statistical impact of algorithms comparing different data sets) including roughly two dozen genuine safety signals the old system had missed, among them sudden cardiac death, Bell’s palsy, and pulmonary infarction, a clot in the lung. Other analyses she shared pointed to elevated signals for heart attack, blood clots, and sudden death. The report says senior officials declined to adopt the better method, and it quotes their emails, including the FDA’s top vaccine official warning that her work could “create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric,” and a later instruction that she “hold off” on sending her reports. A separate 2022 message has an official suggesting the weekly reports be stopped in connection with public-records requests.20But boil it down to what the documents flatly show. The agency had a better tool. The man who helped build its systems told them to use it. They did not. And the reasons they wrote down at the time were not about statistics; they were about how the findings would look and what they might “feed.” That is the same move as everywhere else in this essay, just one floor down: not silencing outside critics this time, but silencing the agency’s own people, by bosses who seem to have weighed the optics of a safety signal right alongside, or above, the signal itself.The other side of the ledgerIf I only went after the government here, I would be committing the same sin I am criticizing: selling one side as the entire truth. So let’s state the other side plainly.Not every bad call was a lie. Pretending otherwise weakens the arguments that actually hold up. The shifting death counts (largly based on modeling, not actual data), the wildly inaccurate early models, the confusion over dying “with” COVID versus “from” COVID, much of that was honest error made under pressure, not deliberate deception. Calling every mistake a conspiracy only helps the people who want to dismiss all criticism, because they can knock down the weakest claim and use it to discredit the stronger ones beside it.And yes, some critics trafficked in their own brand of false certainty. Predictions of mass vaccine deaths on an apocalyptic scale never materialized anywhere near the levels claimed. Some allegations, such as the idea that the vaccines contained “nanobots” for tracking or mind control, or that graphene oxide was secretly added as part of a covert technological scheme, were unsupported by credible evidence and often veered into outright fantasy. Certainty was oversold by more than one side. Admitting that does not weaken the case against the government. It strengthens it, because it separates exaggeration from documented fact.But there is a fundamental difference between citizens speaking in a chaotic public square, even wrong or opportunistic citizens, and the government itself. The government holds power. The government can coerce, censor, regulate, punish, close businesses, remove livelihoods, and restrict movement. And during COVID, many of those powers were exercised based on claims that officials presented as settled science when they knew the evidence was uncertain, incomplete, or in some cases directly contradicted by their own internal data. That is not the same thing as random people shouting bad takes on the internet. Not even close.And for the record, many of the claims censored most aggressively are the ones that aged the best. The myocarditis risk, dismissed in 2021 as anti-vaccine fearmongering, now appears in FDA-required safety warnings. Meanwhile, the pandemic relief programs turned into one of the largest fraud bonanzas in modern history. Federal auditors estimate that more than $200 billion in relief funds were stolen or fraudulently claimed, at least seventeen cents of every dollar spent. In any normal era, that alone would have been a national scandal. Instead, it was buried beneath the avalanche of everything else.Many of the people raising those concerns early were mocked, censored, or branded as misinformation spreaders. Time has not been especially kind to their critics..12 13 14What we lostSo if this was not one grand, tidy conspiracy, then what exactly was the lie?The lie was the manufactured certainty, and the censorship used to protect it. It was taking “we do not really know yet” and translating it into “the science says” before mandating lockdowns, masks or vaccines. It was presenting provisional guesses as settled fact, suppressing dissent from qualified people who challenged the narrative, and then quietly rewriting the story later when the evidence changed.Again and again, the public was treated not as free citizens worthy of honesty, but as a population to be managed, nudged, frightened, and steered. Even when the experts themselves were often operating on incomplete data, assumptions, and educated guesses.And this matters far beyond any single statistic, mandate, or policy mistake. Trust is the one thing a public-health system cannot manufacture in the middle of a crisis. It can only spend the trust it has already earned. And the fastest way to burn through that trust is to project absolute confidence, silence critics, get caught being wrong, and then issue the correction in a whisper months later or never at al. Do that often enough, and eventually they will create exactly what we have now: a country that instinctively distrusts official certainty, even in moments when the authorities may finally be telling the truth. That may prove to be the most damaging legacy of the entire pandemic era.The solution is almost painfully old-fashioned. Tell people the truth, including the parts you are uncertain about. Say, “This is our best estimate right now, and it may change as we learn more.” Allow disagreement, especially when you feel most certain, because any claim that cannot survive open challenge was never solid science in the first place. Correct mistakes as loudly as you made them. Treat the public like adults capable of handling uncertainty and nuance.Because the alternative, treating citizens like children who must be shielded from dissent and managed through fear and selective information, does not ultimately protect public health. It protects institutional authority, right up until the moment that authority collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.What would actually fix the problemDiagnosis without a remedy is just complaint. None of these failures were inevitable. They came from the way these institutions are built, and what is built can be rebuilt. And here is the important part: none of these fixes require assuming anyone acted in bad faith. Every one of them would help even if every official meant well, which is precisely why they are worth doing.Use the best safety tool you have or explain why you didn’t.The data-mining failure has a straightforward fix. When a better method exists and your own statisticians are recommending it, you either adopt it or you publicly explain, in plain terms, why you did not. A regulator running vaccine safety on a tool it knows has a blind spot, while a corrected tool sits unused, should have to defend that choice in the open. And the methods themselves should be reviewed by someone outside the agency, not just the results.Make the safety data public and searchable, in close to real time.The heart-inflammation delay only worked because the public could not see what the agencies could see. The raw, anonymized safety reports should be open by default, and the analyses run on them should be posted on a regular schedule, not pried loose through lawsuits and records requests years later. Transparency should not be something you have to sue for. When officials are caught discussing whether to stop internal safety reports because someone might request them, the incentives are pointing exactly backwards.Separate the agency that promotes a product from the one that polices it.A great deal of this trouble flows from one built-in conflict: the same institutions charged with promoting vaccination were also charged with detecting and announcing its harms. When the people who would have to sound the alarm are also measured by how many doses get administered, the temptation to soften, delay, and reassure is built into the organization itself. Vaccine-safety monitoring should sit in a body that is independent of the people responsible for uptake, with its own authority to tell the public what it finds. Also, consider whether promotion of a medical product by the government is necessary or useful. Regulatory capture has become all to common and must be avoided at all costs.Give people the real range, not a fake-confident number.The fatality-rate fiasco, masking, long-term lockdowns, shutting down of schools, and the six-foot rule have the same root: estimates and guesses got handed to the public stripped of the doubt behind them. Official guidance should come with its confidence level attached and should say plainly what would change the advice. “Our best guess is X, it could reasonably be anywhere from Y to Z, and here is what we are watching” is not weakness. It is the only honest way to talk when you do not fully know, and it is the only way to keep any credibility when the number later moves.At the population level, Guidance should be guidance: It should not be mandated and not forced.Draw a clear line between the government and what you are allowed to read.The censorship worked because no one ever defined the boundary between a government “request” and a government order. Agencies should be required to log and publicly post their communications with platforms about specific posts (such as threatening violence or harm), so that “flagging” cannot quietly become coercion in the dark. The question the Supreme Court declined to answer on procedural grounds, Congress can still answer with legislation: clear limits on officials pressuring platforms, and a workable way for ordinary people to challenge it when it happens.Protect the whistleblowers inside the building.In nearly every episode in this essay, someone on the inside saw the problem early and was sidelined for saying so. An agency scientist who raises a safety concern through the proper channels should be protected, not treated as an obstacle. You can measure the health of these institutions with a single question: what happens to the person who turns out to be right too early? Lately the answer has too often been that they are managed, silenced, pushed out, or deplatformed (as I am still permanently banned on LinkedIn). Change that answer, and most of the rest follows.None of this is exotic, and none of it depends on relitigating any single scientific fight. They all rest on one idea: institutions earn trust by being correctable, and the machinery of correction, open data, independent safety review, protected whistleblowers, and a free public argument, is exactly what got switched off during the years this essay describes. Turn it back on, and good faith will return - slowly, but it will return.That is thebig lie my government told me. Not that the virus was this or that. The lie was that anyone - and particularly government officials- in those first frightening months, was as certain as they sounded, and then the decision to silence everyone who said otherwise.  Maybe they all thought it necessary to project certainty to avoid mass panic.  But I prefer to believe that if these court intellectuals had been more honest and less arrogant, and had trusted the public to be able to process the truth, we would be in a much better place today.The point does not just apply to COVID.To this day, government public relations specialists and press officers continue to spin and mislead, just the same way that corporate PR people do.  But in 2026, the internet sees through everything, and information gaps are rapidly filled in with a range of alternative interpretations.Rather than constantly spinning convenient half-truths, maybe they should try just leveling and speaking truth with American citizens?Wouldn’t that be a refreshing change.Notes and ReferencesNumbered notes correspond to the superscript markers in the text. Links point to the underlying primary documents (court opinions, agency reports, journal articles, and official transcripts) wherever available.1.Anthony S. Fauci, H. Clifford Lane, and Robert R. Redfield, “Covid-19: Navigating the Uncharted,” New England Journal of Medicine 382, no. 13 (2020): 1268–1269 (published online February 28, 2020), DOI: 10.1056/NEJMe2002387. The editorial states that the case fatality rate “may be considerably less than 1%” and that the overall clinical consequences “may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.”https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe20023872.Transcript and video, House Committee on Oversight and Reform, hearing on the coronavirus outbreak, March 11, 2020 (Dr. Fauci’s exchange stating that seasonal influenza has a mortality of 0.1 percent and that COVID-19 has “a mortality rate of 10 times that”). C-SPAN archive.https://www.c-span.org/video/?470291-1/house-oversight-committee-hearing-coronavirus-response3.Ronald B. Brown, “Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 14, no. 3 (2020): 364–371. The paper identifies the misclassification of an influenza infection fatality rate (0.1%) against a COVID-19 case fatality rate, a comparison of unlike denominators.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7511835/4.House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, transcribed interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci, January 8–9, 2024. Fauci testified that the six-foot distancing recommendation “sort of just appeared” and acknowledged he was not aware of supporting clinical data. The full transcript is archived by the Subcommittee.https://oversight.house.gov/release/wenstrup-releases-transcript-of-dr-anthony-fauci-transcribed-interview%E2%80%AF/5.U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of COVID-19 Vaccines,” and U.S. Food and Drug Administration vaccine guidance materials, documenting the evolution of recommendations and the recognition that vaccination did not reliably prevent infection or transmission.https://www.cdc.gov/covid/hcp/clinical-care/index.html6.On the original hospital-capacity rationale of “flatten the curve,” see the CDC pandemic-planning literature on nonpharmaceutical interventions and community mitigation, which framed the strategy as slowing transmission to protect health-system capacity rather than eliminating total infections. CDC, “Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza,” MMWR Recommendations and Reports 66, no. 1 (2017).https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm7.The Lancet statement: Charles Calisher et al., “Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19,” The Lancet 395, no. 10226 (March 7, 2020): e42–e43 (published online February 19, 2020), condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext8.Emails obtained under public-records requests, published by U.S. Right to Know, document that EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak drafted and organized the Lancet statement and arranged for it to appear independent of EcoHealth, and that collaborators discussed not signing to avoid the appearance of self-interest. See also the House Select Subcommittee’s final report on COVID-19 origins (December 2024).https://oversight.house.gov/report/after-action-review-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-the-lessons-learned-and-a-path-forward/9.Office of the Director of National Intelligence / Central Intelligence Agency origins assessment (January 2025), in which CIA assessed a research-related origin as more likely than a natural one, with low confidence; reported across multiple outlets and reflected in the Intelligence Community’s declassified materials. See ODNI, “Declassified Assessment on COVID-19 Origins” (updated materials).https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2023/3681-declassified-assessment-on-covid-19-origins10.The trial-court findings appear in Missouri v. Biden, No. 3:22-cv-01213 (W.D. La. 2023), later reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which agreed in substantial part that federal officials likely “coerced” or “significantly encouraged” platforms to suppress disfavored speech. The Supreme Court resolved the matter on standing without reaching the First Amendment merits in Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. ___ (2024).https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf11.Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), slip opinion. The majority recounts that White House officials “publicly and privately called on the platforms” to act on alleged misinformation and that the Surgeon General, CDC, FBI, and CISA communicated with platforms about COVID-19 and election-related content.https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf12.U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Inspector General, “COVID-19 Pandemic EIDL and PPP Loan Fraud Landscape,” White Paper, Report 23-09 (June 27, 2023). OIG estimated that SBA disbursed more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds, at least 17 percent of all such funds disbursed.https://www.sba.gov/document/report-23-09-covid-19-pandemic-eidl-ppp-loan-fraud-landscape13.U.S. Government Accountability Office, “COVID-19 Relief: Improved Controls Needed for Referring Likely Fraud in SBA’s Pandemic Loan Programs,” GAO-25-107267 (2025), which recounts the SBA OIG’s $200 billion estimate and the SBA’s competing $36 billion figure.https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-107267/index.html14.U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “FDA Approves Required Updated Warning in Labeling of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Regarding Myocarditis and Pericarditis Following Vaccination,” FDA Safety Communication, June 25, 2025. The communication cites an estimated incidence of roughly 27 cases per million doses among males aged 12–24 for the 2023–2024 formulation.https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/safety-availability-biologics/fda-approves-required-updated-warning-labeling-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-regarding-myocarditis-and15.National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Evidence Review of the Adverse Effects of COVID-19 Vaccination and Intramuscular Vaccine Administration (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2024), DOI: 10.17226/27746; and large randomized trials of ivermectin (e.g., the TOGETHER and ACTIV-6 trials) and hydroxychloroquine (e.g., the RECOVERY trial) finding no meaningful benefit for COVID-19.https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27746/16.Dror Mevorach et al., “Myocarditis after BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine against Covid-19 in Israel,” New England Journal of Medicine 385, no. 23 (2021): 2140–2149, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2109730. The study records that, after early reports of myocarditis, the Israeli Ministry of Health initiated active surveillance beginning in February 2021.https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa210973017.U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ACIP COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical (VaST) Work Group Report, May 24, 2021 (archived): “Data from VAERS show that in the 30-day window following dose 2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccination, there was a higher number of observed than expected myocarditis/pericarditis cases in 16–24-year-olds.” See also the VaST Work Group Report of May 17, 2021.https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/vaccines/acip/work-groups-vast/report-2021-05-24.html18.Letter from U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson to the Department of Health and Human Services, FDA, and CDC (November 19, 2024), describing FOIA records indicating that a draft Health Alert Network (HAN) warning on myocarditis was prepared and that then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky received a draft HAN message on May 23, 2021, shortly before the agency’s May 27, 2021 public acknowledgment. Underlying FOIA timeline reporting by Zachary Stieber, The Epoch Times.https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/services/files/00AAFB3D-72EE-475F-94D5-66708B4AA86D19.World Health Organization, Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS) COVID-19 subcommittee, “Updated guidance regarding myocarditis and pericarditis reported with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines,” July 9, 2021, noting a strong myocarditis/pericarditis signal with mRNA vaccines, predominantly in younger males and more often after the second dose.https://www.who.int/news/item/09-07-2021-gacvs-guidance-myocarditis-pericarditis-covid-19-mrna-vaccines20.U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Minority/Majority Staff), interim report and records released in conjunction with the hearing “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals” (April 29, 2026). The report describes Dr. Ana Szarfman’s March 1, 2021 presentation of a regression-adjusted data-mining method (developed by Dr. William DuMouchel) that identified “49 examples of extreme masking,” and quotes internal communications including Dr. Peter Marks’s warning that the analysis could “create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric.” These are findings and characterizations of a congressional investigation; a disproportionality “signal” indicates a need for investigation, not established causation.https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2026/4/media-advisory-psi-chairman-johnson-releases-report-will-hold-hearing-on-biden-health-officials-failure-to-detect-covid-19-vaccine-safety-signals21.Piero Olliaro, Els Torreele, and Michel Vaillant, “COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and effectiveness: the elephant (not) in the room,” The Lancet Microbe 2, no. 7 (2021): e279–e280, reporting that the 95% relative risk reduction for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine corresponds to an absolute risk reduction of roughly 0.84% over the trial period. See also Peter Doshi, “Pfizer and Moderna’s 95% effective vaccines: let us be cautious and first see the full data,” The BMJ Opinion (November 26, 2020), and the trial paper, Polack et al., “Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine,” New England Journal of Medicine 383 (2020): 2603–2615. Reporting relative risk reduction is the standard convention for vaccine trials; the critique is that the absolute figure should have been published alongside it.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(21)00069-0/fulltextA note on sourcing: where a primary document (a court opinion, an inspector general report, a journal article, or an official transcript) is available, it is cited and linked directly. A few items reference congressional committee publications that themselves compile and reproduce the underlying primary records, such as the obtained emails and interview transcripts.Thanks for reading Malone News! 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Summary: What time has revealed about the COVID era, and why the silencing of dissent was the most consequential failure of all