Ralph Baric Just Blew Up the Official COVID Origins Narrative

Audio Version:Executive SummaryOver the past day, we have worked our way through the thousands of pages of documents Senator Rand Paul recently released in hisCOVID-19 Reading Room, including the transcribed interview with Dr. Ralph Baric released today. Using AI to analyze this enormous collection of congressional testimony, emails, and Slack messages, we uncovered a series of remarkable revelations that fundamentally change our understanding of how the origins of COVID-19 were discussed behind closed doors.For more than five years, the American public was told that the science was settled. The laboratory-origin hypothesis was dismissed as implausible,The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2became the definitive scientific narrative, and those who questioned it were censored, ridiculed, and marginalized.The newly released documents in Senator Rand Paul’s COVID-19 Reading Room tell a very different story.Congressional testimony from Dr. Ralph Baric and thousands of pages of private Slack messages reveal that the scientists closest to the evidence privately debated laboratory scenarios, acknowledged uncertainty, discussed gain-of-function research, and questioned many of the very assumptions that were presented to the public as settled science.Baric himself confirms that DARPA’s proposed coronavirus experiments were gain-of-function research, acknowledges conducting gain-of-function unpublished experiments that undermined a central argument ofProximal Origin, and describes years of coronavirus work involving many of the same investigators and institutions that later became central to the origins debate.Meanwhile, the Slack discussions show that the paper’s authors continued privately exploring laboratory-related mechanisms both before and long after their paper had become the foundation for government messaging and censorship.These documents prove that the public was never given the full scientific debate. They expose serious questions about scientific transparency, government involvement, funding disclosures, oversight of gain-of-function research, and the extraordinary effort to present uncertainty as certainty during one of the most consequential public health crises in modern history.Share1. DARPA explicitly solicited gain-of-function researchBaric testified that the DARPA PREEMPT program required gain-of-function experiments to answer the scientific question it posed.His exact words:“That’s a gain-of-function experiment. There’s no other way to think about it.”This undercuts years of semantic arguments that the proposed work somehow wasn’t GOF.2. DEFUSE proposed inserting a furin cleavage siteBaric confirmed that under the DEFUSE proposal,his laboratorywould have performed the furin cleavage site insertion.The furin cleavage site became one of the central scientific features that fueled lab-origin scrutiny.During his congressional testimony, Baric acknowledged that the DARPA DEFUSE proposal called for inserting a furin cleavage site into SARS-like bat coronaviruses and confirmed that his laboratory at UNC would have been responsible for engineering those viruses. He further acknowledged that inserting a furin cleavage site to determine whether it changes viral phenotype constitutes gain-of-function research, and he described DARPA's PREEMPT solicitation as asking for "a gain-of-function experiment" with "no other way to think about it."At the same time, Baric testified that DARPA rejected the DEFUSE proposal and that the specific experiments outlined in that proposal were therefore never performed.But then, Baric also acknowledged conducting other furin cleavage site insertion experiments in coronaviruses as part of his broader research program, demonstrating both the technical capability and the scientific interest in precisely the type of work described in DEFUSE.The unresolved question is whether substantially similar experiments ultimately proceeded under other federally funded projects.We know that NIH later funded coronavirus research involving many of the same investigators and institutions associated with DEFUSE - in fact there is evidence that NIH funded almost that exact same grant, but the documents released to date do not, by themselves, establish that the specific furin cleavage site insertion experiments proposed to DARPA were subsequently carried out under an NIH grant. Although that scenario is highly likely.That question remains one of the central issues for investigators examining the documentary record.Below is a chart comparing the DEFUSE proposal and the NIH-funded research.Were the furin cleavage site and related gain-of-function experiments proposed in DEFUSE later carried out under the NIH-funded grants or contracts, either in whole or in part? If so, where are the protocols, progress reports, sequence data, laboratory notebooks, and oversight reviews?To be sure, Senator Paul’s research team is all over that question.3. Baric had unpublished data that weakened a major argument inProximal OriginPublished inNature Medicineon March 17, 2020,"The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2"became the most influential scientific paper arguing that SARS-CoV-2 was not a laboratory construct and that "any type of laboratory-based scenario" was not considered plausible. Since publication, prominent scientists and scientific organizations have submitted formal petitions and open letters calling for the paper to be corrected, withdrawn, or retracted in light of subsequently released evidence and congressional investigations.Nature Medicinehas acknowledged receiving these requests but has refused to retract the paper, issue an Editorial Expression of Concern, or otherwise alter the scientific record.Baric testified he had previously demonstrated that maximizing ACE2 binding is not necessarily advantageous.Stronger receptor binding can actually reduce viral spread.He says he informed NIH and destroyed the experimental materials.That directly weakens one of the principal arguments used inProximal Originagainst deliberate engineering.4. The “Proximal Origin” authors did not believe their own story about a natural origin for the virus.Slack messages show Kristian Andersen did not have confidence in the natural origin theory by the time the paper was published.He writes that he is moving “much more toward the middle.”Elsewhere he indicates that, given what he knows, both origin scenarios are plausible (From the Slack archive in Rand’s reading room).5. The scientists spent months privately debating tissue-culture scenariosThe Slack discussions repeatedly focus on:tissue culture,furin cleavage sites,cell adaptation,host-range experiments,Wuhan Institute work.Those are precisely the mechanisms central to laboratory-accident hypotheses, showing the issue remained an active scientific discussion rather than a settled question.6. Baric confirms he attended the secret February 1,  2020 origins callOn February 1, 2020, Sir Jeremy Farrar, then Director of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world's most influential biomedical research foundations, organized a confidential teleconference bringing together Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut, Edward (Eddie) Holmes, Michael Farzan, Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, Marion Koopmans, and several other leading virologists to discuss whether SARS-CoV-2 had emerged naturally or from a laboratory accident.Farrar later revealed in his memoirSpikethat the discussions were considered so sensitive he used a disposable ("burner") phone for the communications surrounding the call.Five participants in that call: Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut, and Edward Holmes would go on to author the highly influentialThe Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2paper, while Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were actively involved in discussions surrounding its development. Farrar now serves as Assistant Director-General at the World Health Organization.Baric acknowledges being on the call with Fauci, Collins, Farrar, Andersen, Garry, Holmes, and others.He cannot explain how he was invited.He says he cannot find any record showing why he was included.Some participants reportedly did not know he was present.He gives somewhat inconsistent accounts about whether he spoke during the meeting.Whether Baric was intentionally withholding information cannot be determined from the testimony. What the testimony clearly shows is that his explanations regarding his invitation and participation are incomplete and, at points, internally inconsistent.Those inconsistencies warrant further scrutiny by Senator Paul’s committee.7. NIH apparently requested records it supposedly had already reviewedDuring the February 2020 discussions, NIH officials reportedly asked Baric for research records that NIH had allegedly reviewed years earlier under its oversight process.This raises questions about NIH’s recordkeeping and oversight of research involving enhanced pathogens.8. Baric sent his taxpayer-funded ACE2 mouse model to WuhanHe confirmed sending the mouse model to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory.Later, when a Chinese company attempted to commercialize that model, Baric described the situation as unethical:“What kind of crap is this?”He also stated that sharing the model was effectively required under research-sharing norms and suggested Congress should change the rules if policymakers objected.Baric also confirmed that he provided his NIH-funded human ACE2 transgenic mouse model to Shi Zhengli's laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Although the transfer of the mice was not itself gain-of-function research, the human ACE2 mouse was specifically designed as an experimental platform for studies involving SARS-like coronaviruses that cannot efficiently infect conventional laboratory mice.The model enabled researchers to evaluate viruses produced through reverse genetics, measure the effects of engineered mutations such as insertion of a furin cleavage site, serially passage viruses to select for increased adaptation or pathogenicity, and determine whether genetically modified viruses exhibited enhanced infectivity, tissue tropism, virulence, or transmissibility.Many of these experimental approaches constitute gain-of-function research and involve the same experimental techniques that are plausible laboratory pathways for the creation of SARS-CoV-2.9. The USAID-Funded Pipeline Behind the Wuhan Coronavirus ResearchAlthough PREDICT was presented as a surveillance program, it created the scientific pipeline for coronavirus gain-of-function research. The full extent of USAID's role in building that pipeline only became apparent years later through congressional investigations and the release of internal communications.USAID’s PREDICT program, led by the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, operated from 2009 through 2020 to identify potentially dangerous viruses before they spilled over into humans. In practice, it funded the discovery, collection, sequencing, cataloging, and international sharing of thousands of SARS-like bat coronaviruses through collaborators that included EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those viruses and their genetic sequences became the foundation for subsequent laboratory research involving reverse genetics, chimeric viruses, human ACE2 mouse models, and other experimental approaches that overlap with, or constitute, gain-of-function research. While PREDICT itself was not established to engineer viruses, it built the scientific infrastructure and international collaborations that made those experiments possible.Internal emails also revealed that Peter Daszak requested that USAID’s PREDICT program be acknowledged as a funding source for the landmark 2015 Baric-Shi paper. That acknowledgment reportedly did not appear until 2020, five years after publication, raising additional questions about the transparency of funding disclosures for coronavirus research involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Emails showed Peter Daszak asking that USAID’s PREDICT program be acknowledged.The acknowledgment was reportedly added only in 2020.The delay raises questions about transparency surrounding funding sources for work involving Wuhan collaborators.10. The Slack archive shows genuine scientific disagreement: not a unified frontKristian Andersen, PhD, is a professor at Scripps Research and Director of Infectious Disease Genomics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute. An internationally recognized evolutionary biologist, he was the lead author of the influential March 2020Nature Medicinepaper,The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, which argued that SARS-CoV-2 was not the product of laboratory engineering and dismissed a laboratory-based origin as implausible. In the years that followed, Andersen became one of the most aggressive public defenders of the natural-origin hypothesis. For years, he used his scientific authority and large social media platform to portray the laboratory-origin hypothesis as unsupported, repeatedly mocking critics and dismissing questions about a possible man-made origin, even as internal emails released later showed that he initially considered aspects of the virus concerning enough to merit serious discussion.Edward “Eddie” Holmes is one of the world's foremost evolutionary virologists, whose decades of research on bat coronaviruses made him uniquely qualified to assess the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. A professor at the University of Sydney and a principal author of the influential March 2020Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2paper, Holmes also participated in the pivotal February 1, 2020 teleconference with Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar, Kristian Andersen, Ralph Baric, and others that shaped the early scientific response to the origins question.Rather than revealing a scientific consensus, the private discussions show Holmes continually pressing for rigorous evidence while other participants privately acknowledged growing uncertainty, offering a far more nuanced picture than the certainty projected in public and written up in their proximal origins paper.Eddie Holmes repeatedly challenges stronger lab-origin claims and asks for additional evidence.The discussions reveal ongoing internal debate rather than unanimous agreement.That makes the later shifts in Andersen’s position that the virus was of natural origin duplicitious, because they occurred despite his active scientific skepticism privately.11. The scientists privately continued exploring laboratory-related mechanisms well after theProximal Origin paperThe Slack archive includes detailed discussions of:template switching,recombination,furin cleavage site generation,co-infection scenarios,alternative evolutionary pathways.These conversations indicate the scientific inquiry continued after publication rather than ending with the paper.The biggest takeawayAfter reviewing thousands of pages of congressional testimony, private Slack messages, emails, and internal documents, one conclusion is unavoidable: the public was never given the full story.These documents show that gain-of-function coronavirus experiments were not imaginary. They were openly discussed, proposed, and, in Dr. Ralph Baric’s own words, explicitly solicited under DARPA’s PREEMPT program. Baric himself acknowledged performing and proposing experiments that he scientifically characterizes as gain-of-function. His defense is not that such work never occurred. His defense is that it was lawful under the regulatory framework that existed at the time because it had been reviewed, exempted, or fell outside the government’s evolving oversight policies.The documents also expose something equally troubling. The scientific assumptions that underpinnedThe Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2paper were far less certain than the public was led to believe. During and after publication, the paper’s own authors privately debated tissue culture, furin cleavage sites, laboratory adaptation, host-range experiments, and other mechanisms central to a potential laboratory origin. The scientific discussion never ended. Only the public discussion did.That raises profound questions about transparency, scientific integrity, federal oversight, funding disclosures, recordkeeping at NIH, and the role government officials played in shaping what became the accepted public narrative.For more than five years, Americans were told that questioning the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was the province of conspiracy theorists. We were assured the science was settled. We were toldProximal Originhad closed the case and that a laboratory origin was implausible.The newly released testimony from Dr. Ralph Baric and the private communications among the authors are important because they reveal that many of the scientists closest to the evidence privately entertained doubts, debated laboratory scenarios, and questioned key assumptions while presenting a far more confident story to the public.They purposefully tried to change the history of COVID-19 itself. The question remains, to what end?It begins with Ralph Baric.There may be no scientist on Earth better positioned to discuss coronavirus gain-of-function research than Ralph Baric.For more than three decades, Baric has been one of the world’s foremost coronavirus researchers. He pioneered reverse genetics systems for coronaviruses, developed the human ACE2 mouse model, collaborated extensively with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and helped develop many of the experimental techniques that later became central to the debate over the origins of COVID-19.His congressional testimony is remarkable because it dismantles, piece by piece, many of the simplistic arguments that were used for years to dismiss the possibility of a laboratory origin.One of the most important moments came when Baric was asked about DARPA’s PREEMPT proposal. His answer was unequivocal.“That’s a gain-of-function experiment. There’s no other way to think about it.”For years, the public was subjected to endless semantic gymnastics over whether gain-of-function research was even being proposed or conducted. Baric swept aside that debate in a single sentence. In his scientific judgment, the proposed experiments were gain-of-function.Why does this matter? Because COVID-19 changed the world.The virus claimed millions of lives. Governments responded with lockdowns that devastated economies, disrupted education, deepened poverty, fueled food insecurity, and inflicted lasting social and psychological harm. Children lost years of normal development. Businesses disappeared. Families were separated. Public trust in science and public health institutions was profoundly damaged. The pandemic accelerated one of the greatest transfers of wealth and economic power in modern American history, from small businesses to multinational corporations, from wage earners to owners of financial assets, and from Main Street to Wall Street. The vaccines also became the subject of unprecedented controversy over safety, mandates, and adverse events that are still being investigated.Baric’s testimony establishes one important fact: gain-of-function coronavirus research was real and probably caused one of the biggest pandemics that the world has ever known.  We now need to know:which experiments were actually performed, who funded them, where were they conducted, what oversight existed, and which of that research contributed, directly or indirectly, to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2?Those are no longer fringe questions. They are the central scientific and public policy questions of our time.Senator Rand Paul’s team has had roadblock after road block thrown at them; they have been stymied by government officials and agencies. But they are managing to break through the floor and find missing documents.  We know, because Robert has played a small part by using advanced systems to track down missing data that have now been shared with Senator Paul.Then comes perhaps the biggest surprise.Then comes perhaps the most remarkable revelation in Baric's testimony. One of the central arguments of theProximal Originpaper was that if SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered, scientists would have optimized its binding to the human ACE2 receptor. Baric told Congress he had already performed unpublished experiments demonstrating that this assumption was flawed. According to his testimony, stronger ACE2 binding does not necessarily produce a more successful virus. In fact, excessive receptor affinity can reduce viral fitness and transmission.He testified that he informed NIH of these findings, destroyed the experimental viruses, and chose not to publish the work because of “biosecurity concerns.” Although Baric did not characterize these experiments as gain-of-function research during this exchange, the testimony raises obvious questions about the nature of the experiments, whether they were supported by NIH funding, and why results that undercut one of the central scientific arguments inProximal Originwere never published.The Slack messages reveal the lies.For years, the American public was told thatThe Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2represented settled science. Government officials repeatedly pointed to the paper as proof that COVID-19 could not have come from a laboratory. Social media companies, under duress by the Biden administration, used it to justify censorship. Journalists cited it as the definitive scientific consensus. Scientists, physicians, and ordinary citizens who questioned that narrative found themselves labeled conspiracy theorists, censored, deplatformed, and, in some cases, professionally ostracized.The private discussions tell a very different story. Kristian Andersen, the paper’s lead author, did not become more certain over time. He became less certain. In fact, by the time of publication, he was privately arguing that the virus was man-made.After months of discussions about tissue culture, furin cleavage sites, coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and newly emerging evidence, Andersen acknowledged that although he had initially leaned strongly toward a natural origin, he was no longer convinced. By the summer of 2020, he wrote that he was “moving much more toward the middle.”Later, he went further still, stating that, based on what he had learned, he regardedbotha natural spillover and a laboratory origin as plausible explanations.That is extraordinary.This was not a scientist reconsidering his conclusions years later after new discoveries. This was the lead author of the paper that shaped global opinion, questioning its central conclusion while the paper was still only just being published, and yet already being treated as the definitive account of COVID-19’s origins.  At a time when the authors could have easily corrected the paper's original conclusions.The Slack archive makes clear that the authors were privately debating precisely the issues the public was assured had already been settled: tissue culture adaptation, furin cleavage sites, laboratory selection, BSL-2 coronavirus research, host-range experiments, EcoHealth Alliance grants, and work conducted at Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan. The discussions were technical, candid, and often vigorous. They do not reflect a group of scientists who had unanimously ruled out a laboratory origin.Which raises the obvious question:Why wasProximal Originwritten with such certainty?Congressional records show that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were actively engaged with the authors during the paper’s development.Those same records also show that shortly after publication, Andersen received a substantial NIH grant.This raises legitimate questions about Fauci's role in shaping the scientific narrative that would dominate public discourse for years.Legitimate questions remain about Fauci's role in asserting that the “science was settled” in favor of a natural origin story by the publication of this paper, which shaped public discourse for years. Examining emails, internal memos, and phone call records from Fauci during this period may uncover whether a quid pro quo was involved.Perhaps most striking of all, even as Andersen’s private confidence in a purely natural origin appeared to erode, his public rhetoric became increasingly absolute. On social media and in interviews, he repeatedly dismissed, ridiculed, and attacked scientists, journalists, and members of the public who questioned the natural-origin narrative, often portraying the laboratory-origin hypothesis as scientifically indefensible despite privately acknowledging that both scenarios remained plausible.The Wuhan Institute itself also comes under much closer scrutiny.One Slack discussion draws an important distinction between Ralph Baric’s reverse genetics experiments and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s tissue-culture work.According to Kristian Andersen, researchers in Wuhan had spent years growing SARS-like bat coronaviruses in different animal cell lines to determine what mutations allowed those viruses to infect human cells more efficiently. That type of research is precisely the sort of laboratory adaptation work that has become central to the debate over COVID-19’s origins. These experiments constitute gain-of-function research.At the time, and still today, no international treaty specifically prohibited gain-of-function research conducted for peaceful scientific purposes, and similar work was and is being performed in laboratories around the world.If research of this type were to produce a pathogen capable of causing a global pandemic, the consequences could rival those of a weapon of mass destruction, raising the obvious point that international oversight has not kept pace with modern biotechnology.Baric acknowledged that the Wuhan experiments closely paralleled research proposed in EcoHealth Alliance grant applications but distinguished them from his own reverse genetics studies, noting they were being conducted under different biosafety conditions. Whether Baric’s experiments ultimately contributed to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown. What is no longer in dispute is that scientists were actively exploring how bat coronaviruses adapt to human hosts through laboratory experimentation and that this virus was almost certainly man-made.If Baric’s experiments produced a virus capable of causing a global pandemic, the consequences would extend far beyond an academic debate over gain-of-function research.  If the Wuhan Lab and the CCP were ultimately responsible, that raises another set of questions about culpability and liability.  Questions that the world leaders clearly do not want to address.The truth is that such research with the potential to create pathogens of catastrophic consequence should never have been conducted in the first place.Where does that leave us?The question is no longer whether a laboratory origin was “implausible.” After reading these documents, a more fundamental question emerges:was the natural-origin narrative ever as convincing as the public was led to believe?The scientists who authoredProximal Originprivately wrestled with laboratory scenarios, debated furin cleavage sites, tissue culture, reverse genetics, and Wuhan’s coronavirus research. Yet publicly, they projected certainty. As their private confidence in a purely natural origin eroded, their public certainty only grew. Scientists who questioned the narrative were ridiculed. Journalists were dismissed. Citizens were censored. That is not how science is supposed to work. It is how narratives are protected.These newly released documents do not prove 100% that SARS-CoV-2 came from a laboratory. But they do prove something equally important: the public was never given the full scientific debate. Instead, it was presented with a manufactured consensus that collapsed the moment private emails, Slack messages, and sworn congressional testimony saw the light of day.Perhaps the greatest irony is that this reckoning is not being led by the institutions that spent years insisting they had already settled the matter. It is not being driven by the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice, or the vast machinery of the administrative state. Instead, much of the documentary record now reshaping this debate has emerged becauseSenator Rand Paul of Kentuckyrefused to stop asking questions.COVID-19 killed millions of people. It upended the global economy, transformed governments, accelerated one of the largest transfers of wealth in modern history, deprived children of years of normal development, and fractured public trust in medicine, science, and government. If research contributed in any way to that catastrophe, then the world deserves a complete accounting—not to assign political blame, but to ensure it never happens again.Science advances by questioning assumptions, following evidence wherever it leads, and correcting mistakes. These documents suggest that, for far too long, protecting the narrative became more important than pursuing the truth. History will ultimately judge which mattered more.JGM/RWMOne final thought.Much of what you’ve just read wasn’t uncovered by the legacy media, government investigators, or billion-dollar news organizations. It came from painstaking review of thousands of pages of testimony, emails, Slack messages, and congressional records. That kind of work takes time, expertise, and resources. Our paid subscribers make it possible. They receive deeper investigations, exclusive analysis, and early access to the stories that matter most.Subscribe nowIf you value independent journalism that follows the evidence rather than the narrative, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It allows us to keep digging where others won’t.

Summary: and other true stories


The Air Quality Scam

The Air Quality Scam: How Statistical Sleight-of-Hand Convinced the World That Breathing Is Killing YouBy Stan Young, PhD and Warren Kindzierski, PhDGuest post on Dr. Robert Malone’s SubstackWe’ve spent decades watching epidemiology turn into something between a cargo cult and a magic show. Worse still, university epidemiologists and government public health policymakers have been trying to convince us for decades that the air we breathe is killing us — and that only trillion-dollar regulatory regimes stand between us and the grave.We just published a paper in theJournal of the Academy of Public Healththat pulls back the curtain on this scam. The response has been... well, the usual deafening silence from the regulatory priesthood. Let’s walk you through the scam.Real Air Pollution Disasters (And Why They Don’t Prove What You Think)First, let’s be honest about where the air quality panic comes from. There werethree genuine eventswhere a combination of temperature inversions, acid in the air, and particulate matter resulted in deaths:· London Fog, 1952 (and again in 1956 and 1962) — Temperature inversions trapped coal smoke, soot, and industrial gases causing 4,000 excess deaths in 1952 (and 1,000 in 1956 and another 700 in 1962).· Meuse River Valley, Belgium, December1930 — Same story. Inversion, trapped industrial emissions, 60 deaths.· Donora, Pennsylvania, October 1948 — Ditto, 20 deaths.These events were real, and here’s the part nobody mentions:these conditions literally cannot occur today.Modern emissions controls and clean air regulations eliminated the conditions that created those killing fogs. Using these events to justify an air quality panic is like citing the 1918 flu to justify locking down for a common cold.Yet the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) still claims particulates in air can causepremature deaths. In 2011, theagency estimatedClean Air Actcompliance costs at $65 billion annually and claimed the regulations would prevent 230,000 premature deaths in 2020.Let’s look at the evidence.Particulate Matter (PM)refers to microscopic solid or liquid particles suspended in the air, classified by their aerodynamic diameter.PM10encompassesinhalable coarse particleswith diameters of10 micrometers (μm) or less. These particles are small enough to pass through the nose and throat into the lungs but are generally filtered out in the upper respiratory tract. Common sources include wind-blown dust, pollen, mold spores, and construction dust.PM2.5refers tofine particleswith diameters of2.5 micrometers (μm) or less. These are small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, posing higher health risks such as respiratory and cardiovascular issues. They originate from combustion sources like vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions, and wildfires.Technically,PM2.5 is a subset of PM10, meaning all PM2.5 particles are included in the PM10 measurement, but PM10 also includes larger particles between 2.5 and 10 μm.The Air Quality‒Premature Death ArgumentThis argument can be traced back to two 1990 studies, both partially funded by the EPA. One became famous, the other ignored.The 1993Harvard Six Cities studyfollowed 8,111 adults across six American cities for 16 years. Over that period, 1,430 people died. The researchers claimed that fine particles in air (PM2.5) increased deaths by26%.Let that sink in. Eight thousand people. Six cities. The “sample size” for statistical purposes?Six. Because the comparisons wereacross cities, not individuals. You can’t get much statistical power from six data points unless you’re using very creative math. Nevertheless, it has been cited over 11,000 times in literature.A 1995National Institute of Statistical Sciences studylooked at over 785,000 deaths among elderly people across two counties over six years. Their finding? No association between PM10 — which is highly correlated with PM2.5 — and deaths. When you breathe, you breathe both.The EPA even secured Harvard’s dataset and, along with industry, partially funded another group of epidemiologists to reanalyze it. The result,published in 2000? If you followed Harvard’s exact analysis, you got roughly the same answer. But if you varied the analysis method — changed a covariate, adjusted for a different confounder — the effect fell apart completely.The EPA did not secure the NISS dataset for reanalysis. Why would you scrutinize a study that found nothing?Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe Big Studies That Found NothingAfter Harvard, two major air quality‒premature death studies dwarfed it in scale:One study in 2011used individual-level data from a population of 18.2 million (with 3.2 million deaths) across 814 US locations over the period 2000 to 2006. They found effectsacrosslocations but noted these were “likely due to unmeasured confounders.” Their within-location analysis? Direct quote: “We are not able to demonstrate any change in life expectancy for a reduction in PM2.5.”Theother study in 2017used individual-level data from a population of roughly 20 million people (with over 2 million deaths) in eight California air basins over the period 2000 to 2012. They found no association between PM2.5 and daily deaths.Just to recap… Harvard’s study: 8,111 people and a positive association between PM2.5 and deaths. Later studies: millions of people, no association.The Dirty Secret of Big Observational DatasetsHere’s the problem nobody in public health wants to discuss… give a complex dataset to different analysts, pose the same research question to them, and watch what happens. You can literally get any result you want.Researchers at Yale recognized this problem back in 1988 (seehereandhere). They initially identified 56 medical and pharmaceutical research claims from observational studies in literature, then they tracked down other studies on thesame topicsfrom thesame period. The result — they found 136 studies supporting the claims and 127 contradicting them. This is coin-flip territory.The president of the Biometrics Society gave his2002 Presidential Addressnoting that when his regression class students were given the same dataset and question as homework, they produced dramatically different results.Today, we know from “multiverse analysis” (many-analyst studies, exampleshereandhere) — where independent teams get the same data and same research question — that there are thousands of seemingly reasonable ways to run an analysis, with wildly different results depending on analysis choices.A concrete example…Smith (2021)analyzed PM2.5‒premature death associations in Medicaid data. He showed that simply removing one covariate — previous day’s temperature — flipped PM2.5 from non-significant to statistically significant. One variable. That’s the difference between “air quality kills” and “nothing to see here.” And researchers have thousands of choices like this to make in their analysis.The Data Harvard Won’t ReleaseHere’s what should keep you up at night… the2011 (Greven) studydemonstrated that when you use individual-level data with proper spatio-temporal modeling, the PM2.5‒premature death association evaporates. It’s a gold-standard approach — individual deaths, precise timing, geographic granularity, and the statistical power of millions of observations.So why hasn’t Harvard released their Six Cities study dataset in a form that would allow someone to run a Greven-style analysis on it? The original dataset, as far as anyone outside the inner circle can tell, remains locked away.The 2000 reanalysis commissioned by the EPA and industry was conducted under controlled conditions with the original Harvard team hovering nearby — and even then, the effect crumbled when the analysis method was varied.Thirty-plus years later, the Six Cities study — thatanchors billions of dollars in EPA regulatory costs— has never been independently reproduced from its raw data with modern methods. In any other field, this would be called what it is…science by press release, sustained by data hoarding.The Research‒Publishing ProblemHere’s what the world doesn’t see happening in the university research‒journal publishing game:· Most studies that do not find positive associations — the negative studies — go unpublished. Researchers put themin file drawersand move on.· Researchers in other studies can useflexible designs and selectively report their resultsto nudge what should be non-significant results to significant.· Journals prefer publishingpositive studies. No editor wants to headline “nothing to see here” in a study.· False positive studies that are published canget canonized— endlessly cited until everyone assumes they’re settled fact.Academicsmake up mostof the journal peer review and editorial positions. The academic publishing and tenure process functions asnatural selection of bad science. Career incentives reward splashy positive findings, not careful null results. The Harvard Six Cities study was a small positive study that became famous. The larger negative studies that followed? Ignored.Follow the MoneyThe EPA justifies its existence and its $65 billion annual regulatory burden by claiming lives are being saved. University researchers who produce studies showing air quality harms public health get grants, publications, tenure, and prestigious appointments. Journals who publish these studies get citations and impact factors. The environmental consulting industry gets contracts.Who benefits from a null result? Nobody. Who loses? Everyone with a stake in the university‒government‒journal publishing industrial complex.The National Association of Scholars published adetailed reportthat we co-authored on how selective research methods gives rise to irreproducible claims for PM2.5 and premature deaths, heart attacks, and asthma attacks. It’s calledShifting Sands— apt, because the scientific foundation for these claims keeps moving if you look closely at the methods.The Bottom LineAir quality‒premature death epidemiology, as currently practiced, looks like astatistical fluke— an artifact of analytical flexibility, publication bias, and unaccounted confounding dressed up as public health consensus.The genuine air disasters of the mid-20th century were real. But they bear no resemblance to current conditions. The Harvard Six Cities study methods crumble under scrutiny. Larger, better-designed studies that followed found nothing. Using the 1952 London fog and Harvard Six Cities study to justify regulatory overreach today is intellectually dishonest.Multiverse analyses show that different reasonable analytical choices produce contradictory results in research. And the entire journal publication ecosystem is structurally biased toward publishing false positive research.Are there real environmental health threats worth addressing? Absolutely. Smoking, asbestos fiber inhalation, foodborne illness outbreaks (e.g., fromE. coli) — these are genuine concerns with plausible mechanisms of harm. But the PM2.5‒premature death panic is a house of cards built on statistical sleight-of-hand and institutional self-preservation.The next time someone tells you that air quality is shaving years off your life, ask them one question:Which covariate did you leave out?Stan Young, PhD, is a statistician and can be reached at genetree@bellsouth.net. Warren Kindzierski, PhD, is a retired college professor (public health) and can be reached at warrenk@ualberta.ca. Young and Kindzierski authored the paper“Are air quality–health effect claims a statistical analysis fluke?” published in the Journal of the Academy of Public Health.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.


Sunday Strip: "Trust the Plan"

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 crosspost, and share it!ShareRobert wearing his dinner again, is a common joke in our house…Of note, after a grueling two days of travel, we are now in Israel for the next week with a delegation of medical freedom professionals.We finally arrived here at 5:00 AM this morning after leaving on Friday. When we arrived in Rome, all of the non-Israeli airlines had canceled their flights due to the once again escalating conflict. So we had to rebook for a second red-eye in a row with an Israeli airline - which are the ones flying into this country right now.Today, we are at the Agricultural University to learn about innovations in agriculture in Israel. As this topic and the use of such innovations in regenerative agriculture are closely related, this day was a not-to-be-missed event for us.You will hear more about this endeavor in the days to come.JGM


Friday Funnies: Screwed

Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to crosspost or share on social media, including notes!ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.True story:JGM

Summary: Thanks for reading Malone News!


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.


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


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.