Congress Builds a Safety Net (Part 2)

The state is that great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.Frédéric Bastiat, “The State,” 1848SummaryCongress’s response to the COVID-19 coordination catastrophe was the PREVENT Pandemics Act, signed into law in December 2022 as part of the omnibus appropriations bill. Section 2104 mandated the creation of the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy within the Executive Office of the President, with a presidentially appointed director, biennial reporting obligations to Congress, and a five-year preparedness outlook. The Act reflected a genuine conservative public health tradition: the federal government has a legitimate role in maintaining readiness for catastrophic biological threats, just as it has a legitimate role in maintaining military readiness. Preparedness is not the same as intervention.This installment places OPPR’s creation within the constitutional architecture that Dobbs v. Jackson and NFIB v. OSHA clarified: the federal government has no general police power over health; direct control of medical practice in the states is beyond its authority; and the proper role of federal pandemic institutions is to support and coordinate, not to assume operational control. It examines the NSC predecessor function performed by Raj Panjabi, whose simultaneous role in WHO Pandemic Accord negotiations raises sovereignty concerns addressed in full. And it documents what OPPR actually did during its two years of operation: the H5N1 interagency coordination that FDA Commissioner Califf credited in Senate testimony, the Moderna vaccine contract, the dose-fractionation decision during the 2022 mpox response, the Bio-5 Biopharmaceutical Alliance, and the Biological Incident Response Playbook.The operational record matters because it is the evidence base for the argument made in Part Three: that the Trump administration’s attrition of a functioning statutory institution is not conservative governance. Before that argument can be evaluated, the record of what OPPR built must be established. This installment provides that record.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.PART TWO — SECTION ACongress Creates OPPR: The Political Structure of a Pandemic BureaucracyThe Legislative Response to COVID-19’s Coordination FailuresThe COVID-19 pandemic exposed a specific and correctable structural failure in the federal government’s response architecture: there was no single entity within the Executive Office of the President whose specific statutory mandate was to coordinate the interagency response to a biological threat across all relevant federal departments simultaneously. The CDC had surveillance authority. HHS had emergency declaration authority. FEMA had logistics authority. The NSC had national security coordination authority. BARDA had medical countermeasure development authority. No single office had the mandate and the position to convene all of them around a unified operational picture on a standing basis.The result, which COVID-19 demonstrated in real time, was that interagency coordination happened through ad hoc structures, bilateral negotiations between agencies, and emergency mechanisms that had to be assembled from scratch as the crisis evolved. Critical decisions about vaccine distribution, testing capacity, and countermeasure procurement were made under conditions of incomplete information because no entity had the statutory role of aggregating what each agency knew into a coherent operational picture. The PREVENT Pandemics Act was Congress’s bipartisan diagnosis of this specific failure and its prescription for correcting it.The Congressional Architecture: What the Statute Actually RequiredThe PREVENT Pandemics Act (Pub. L. 117-328, Section 2104) was signed into law on December 29, 2022, as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act. The relevant provisions mandated the establishment of the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy within the Executive Office of the President. The office’s director was to be presidentially appointed, providing it with institutional standing to convene interagency processes that a career official or a detail from an existing agency would not have had. The statutory mandate included: serving as the principal adviser to the President on pandemic preparedness; coordinating federal activities related to pandemic preparedness and response policy; engaging with state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, as well as international partners; and overseeing implementation of the National Biodefense Strategy.The Act required the OPPR director to submit a biennial preparedness review to Congress and a five-year preparedness outlook. These reporting requirements were not bureaucratic formalities. They were the mechanism by which Congress attempted to ensure that pandemic preparedness remained a visible, accountable government function rather than a periodic emergency reaction. A White House office that was required to report its findings to Congress every two years had an institutional incentive to have something to report, and Congress, which received those reports, had the information basis for the appropriations and oversight decisions mandated by the statute.Bipartisan Origins and Conservative AmbivalenceThe PREVENT Pandemics Act passed with significant Republican support. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the ranking Republican on the Senate Health Committee, was among its key architects. The legislation reflected a genuine conservative public health tradition: the belief that government has a legitimate role in preparing for catastrophic biological threats, in the same way that it has a legitimate role in maintaining military readiness or flood control infrastructure. Preparedness is not the same as intervention. Building the capacity to respond to a pandemic is not the same as running the pandemic response in ways that override individual liberty.Conservative ambivalence about OPPR stems from a different source: the concern that creating a permanent White House office dedicated to pandemic preparedness will inevitably tend toward mission creep, expanding government authority, and the kind of permanent bureaucratic class that develops institutional interests in the perpetuation and expansion of its own mandate. These concerns are not irrational. The Biden administration’s management of the COVID-19 Response Team demonstrated precisely how pandemic-related authority can be weaponized for political purposes. The question is whether the answer to that risk is better oversight and clearer statutory limits, or the abandonment of the institutional capacity entirely.Dobbs v. Jackson and the Constitutional Architecture of Federal Medical AuthorityThe conservative case for limiting federal pandemic authority is not merely a political preference. It is, as the Supreme Court has made increasingly clear, a constitutional argument with growing doctrinal weight. No decision has clarified the constitutional architecture of federal medical authority more starkly in recent years than Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022). Dobbs is understood primarily as an abortion case. Its implications for the structural question of who governs medicine in America extend considerably further.The Dobbs majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by four other justices, located the abortion question within a broader principle that has direct application to pandemic governance. The Court held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and returned the regulation of abortion to the states. In doing so, it restated a foundational constitutional proposition that had been obscured by decades of federal expansion into health policy: that ‘direct control of medical practice in the states is beyond the power of the federal government,’ and that the federal government possesses no general police power over health, education, and welfare. That power belongs, by constitutional design, to the states.Dobbs restated a foundational constitutional proposition: ‘direct control of medical practice in the states is beyond the power of the federal government.’ The federal government has no general police power over health.This is not a novel constitutional claim. It is a restatement of the Tenth Amendment’s structural logic, applied to a specific and consequential domain. The states hold plenary police power over public health under the constitutional design. The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution. The federal government has no enumerated power over health and medicine; it acts in the health domain through the Commerce Clause, the Spending Clause, and specific statutory delegations, each of which has limits. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the foundational public health federalism case from 1905, upheld a state vaccine mandate, not a federal one, precisely because the Court recognized that this kind of regulatory authority belonged to the states and their police power, not to the national government.The COVID-19 pandemic put this constitutional architecture under severe stress. The Biden administration’s approach to pandemic management was built on an expansive theory of federal authority: that a sufficiently severe public health emergency could sustain federal vaccine mandates on private employers via OSHA, federal eviction moratoriums via CDC, and a sustained White House operation to shape the national information environment. The Supreme Court pushed back at each turn. In National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA (2022), decided the same term as Dobbs, the Court blocked the Biden administration’s large-employer vaccine-or-test mandate, holding that OSHA had no authority to impose a sweeping health regulation that went far beyond workplace-specific hazard control. The Court explicitly invoked the major questions doctrine: when an agency claims authority of vast economic and political significance, it must point to clear congressional authorization. Pandemic management is not a clear OSHA authorization. Pandemic management is, constitutionally, primarily a state function.The implication for OPPR and for the broader apparatus of federal pandemic preparedness is uncomfortable but important. The conservative case for limiting OPPR’s mandate is not simply a preference for smaller government. It is a constitutionally grounded argument that the federal government’s proper role in health emergencies is narrow, specific, and defined by statutory authorization rather than executive ambition. The federal government can maintain vaccine stockpiles, fund research, and support logistics that only national resources can provide. What it cannot constitutionally do, as Dobbs, NFIB v. OSHA, and the vaccine mandate cases collectively make clearer, is assume general supervisory authority over the medical decisions of states, institutions, and individuals.The Dobbs framework also reinforces a point about democratic legitimacy that runs throughout the conservative critique of the COVID-19 response. The Court’s holding was explicitly that profound questions about medical practice and bodily autonomy should be resolved by the people’s elected representatives in the states, not by federal courts or federal agencies. That principle applies with equal force to pandemic governance. The decisions made during COVID-19 about mask mandates, school closures, business restrictions, and vaccine requirements were of exactly the kind of local political significance that, under the constitutional design, should be made by governors and state legislators accountable to their citizens, not by White House officials accountable to no one outside the executive branch.The federalism argument also has a practical dimension that the COVID-19 experience validates. The patchwork of state responses to COVID-19, widely criticized by centralizing commentators as inconsistent, also served as a set of natural policy experiments. States that took different approaches to school reopening, business restrictions, and masking generated data that, over time, permitted more evidence-based assessment of which interventions actually affected outcomes and at what cost. A fully federalized pandemic response, in which Washington determined the single national approach, would have foreclosed that comparative learning. The states’ traditional role as laboratories of democracy is not merely a federalism abstraction. In public health, as in other policy domains, it is a genuine epistemic resource.None of this is an argument against federal pandemic-preparedness investment of the kind that OPPR was designed to coordinate. Federal funding for vaccine development, stockpile management, and international surveillance is constitutionally grounded in enumerated powers and practically justified by the national-security character of pandemic preparedness. The Dobbs framework does not prohibit federal spending on public health. What it does is clarify where the constitutional boundary lies: between federal preparedness support and federal operational control of medical practice. OPPR, properly understood, was designed to sit on the permissible side of that line. The Biden administration’s COVID-19 Response Team operated well past it. The conservative task is to hold that distinction rigorously and resist the institutional tendency to let preparedness authority expand into operational control during the next emergency, when the political pressure to do so will be overwhelming.Raj Panjabi: The NSC Predecessor and the WHO ConnectionThe official who most directly shaped Biden’s pandemic preparedness framework before OPPR existed was Raj Panjabi, who served as White House Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council from 2021 to 2023. Panjabi’s biography is worth knowing: born in Liberia in 1981 to Indian immigrant parents, he fled civil war at age nine and eventually earned his MD from the University of North Carolina, an MPH in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins, and completed clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. In 2007 he co-founded Last Mile Health with $6,000 in wedding gifts, eventually training approximately 16,000 community health workers serving 19 million people across Liberia, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone. He received a 2017 TED Prize and was knighted by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.At the NSC, Panjabi coordinated more than $12 billion in annual federal biodefense investment across 16 agencies, led implementation of the 2022 National Biodefense Strategy, and represented the United States in negotiations over both the WHO International Health Regulations and the WHO Pandemic Accord. That last role requires scrutiny. The WHO Pandemic Accord, finalized in 2024 after years of contentious negotiation, contains provisions that critics across the political spectrum have identified as problematic: pathogen access and benefit-sharing arrangements that could compel nations to share biological samples and intellectual property with the WHO secretariat; a proposed surveillance framework granting WHO authorities to declare pandemics that trigger member-state obligations; and equity provisions requiring wealthy-nation pharmaceutical companies to donate a portion of pandemic vaccine production. Panjabi also served as technical adviser to former President Sirleaf as co-chair of the WHO Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, whose 2021 report ‘COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic’ recommended establishing a new Global Health Threats Council at head-of-government level with mandatory financing authority, a proposal that conservatives argued would transfer meaningful national sovereignty over health emergencies to an unaccountable international body. These are not marginal concerns. The official who designed Biden’s domestic pandemic preparedness architecture was simultaneously the administration’s primary representative in negotiations over the international governance framework that conservatives have consistently identified as the most significant long-term threat to U.S. health sovereignty.The NSC location of Panjabi’s role had an institutional significance that Congress deliberately addressed through OPPR. NSC records are shielded from congressional oversight and public FOIA access by the Presidential Records Act. A pandemic preparedness function housed there operates largely outside public view. OPPR, placed within the broader Executive Office of the President, was designed to provide what the NSC cannot: statutory accountability, congressional reporting requirements, and public transparency. When the Trump administration declined to staff OPPR and effectively returned preparedness functions to the NSC, it replicated precisely the structural opacity Congress had tried to correct. After leaving government in 2023, Panjabi joined Flagship Pioneering as Senior Partner, launched the AI health venture Etiome, and co-signed bipartisan CSIS briefs with inaugural OPPR director Paul Friedrichs urging the Trump administration to reverse its attrition of the biodefense enterprise. He serves on the boards of the WHO Foundation and the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense.OPPR’s Launch, Staffing, and the Budget ProblemOPPR formally launched in July 2023. Major General (ret.) Paul Friedrichs was named inaugural director. A physician and retired Air Force officer who had served as Joint Staff Surgeon and medical adviser to the Department of Defense’s COVID-19 Task Force, Friedrichs was a credible, non-partisan choice who had spent a career in military medicine and interagency coordination. Nikki Romanik served as Deputy Director and Chief of Staff. The office eventually grew to more than twenty experts drawn from medicine, science, policy, and defense.Almost immediately, OPPR confronted a structural problem that its congressional architects had not fully resolved: the office was mandated without a dedicated appropriation. Congress required OPPR to exist but did not designate specific funding for it. The government’s reliance on a series of continuing resolutions rather than regular appropriations meant that the $6.8 million Friedrichs estimated was needed to fully perform the office’s statutory functions was never actually appropriated. OPPR operated, in Friedrichs’s later description, on a shoestring.This underfunding is itself a congressional accountability failure worth noting. Congress created a statutory mandate but failed to ensure that the appropriations process followed through. An office that cannot independently hire, contract, or build institutional momentum is perpetually dependent on the White House’s discretionary support, which means its effectiveness tracks the current administration’s level of interest in pandemic preparedness rather than the statutory mandate Congress established.PART TWO — SECTION BOPPR in Operation: Monkeypox, H5N1, and the Infrastructure of PreparednessDemetre Daskalakis and the 2022 Mpox Response: The Problem OPPR Was Designed to SolveThe 2022 mpox outbreak arrived before OPPR existed, and the federal government’s handling of it documented in real time the coordination failures Congress sought to correct through the PREVENT Pandemics Act. President Biden appointed FEMA Regional Administrator Robert Fenton as White House National Monkeypox Response Coordinator and Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, then CDC Director of HIV/AIDS Prevention, as deputy coordinator on August 2, 2022. The appointments came nearly three months after the first confirmed U.S. case. By that date more than 5,800 cases had accumulated and no federal public health emergency had yet been declared; the declaration followed two days later. A GAO audit released in 2024 concluded that HHS’s response had been uncoordinated and lacked interagency cohesion, precisely the structural deficit OPPR was designed to remedy.The most consequential and contested policy decision of the Daskalakis-led response was the August 9 FDA Emergency Use Authorization for intradermal dose-fractionation of the JYNNEOS vaccine. JYNNEOS had been approved in 2019 for smallpox prevention in adults at high risk, with a separate monkeypox indication added as an extension of that approval. It had been stockpiled, in minimal quantities, for smallpox bioterrorism contingencies, not for deployment against a sexually transmitted outbreak in a population of potentially one to two million high-risk individuals. The United States entered August 2022 with roughly 440,000 doses on hand against a demand that vastly exceeded supply. The administration’s solution was dose fractionation: a one-fifth subcutaneous dose administered intradermally, between the skin layers rather than beneath them, on the basis of a single 2015 immunogenicity study showing comparable antibody response at the fractional dose. The EUA quintupled effective supply overnight. FDA Commissioner Robert Califf was candid about the evidentiary basis: there was no traditional clinical outcomes assessment for the vaccine because prior monkeypox outbreaks had not been large enough to support one. The administration was deploying a smallpox vaccine at a novel dose and route, in a novel indication, justified by immunological proxy data rather than efficacy trials. A May 2023 breakthrough cluster in Chicago among fully vaccinated individuals subsequently raised durability questions that CDC research left unresolved. Daskalakis appeared at the White House podium to defend the strategy and served as the administration’s primary interface with LGBTQ+ community organizations throughout the response. When OPPR launched in July 2023, he had returned to CDC as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, where the relationships he had formed with OPPR’s Nikki Romanik and Paul Friedrichs during the mpox deployment would later facilitate coordination during the H5N1 response.The Monkeypox Response: OPPR and the Clade I OutbreakOPPR’s own mpox test came with the Clade I outbreak, which required coordinated domestic and international response across multiple federal agencies with overlapping but distinct authorities. The CDC held primary authority for domestic disease surveillance and public health guidance. The FDA regulated vaccines and treatments. USAID and the State Department managed international dimensions. HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) coordinated medical countermeasures. Without a central convening authority, these agencies would coordinate bilaterally, slowly, and incompletely.OPPR served as that central convening authority. The office established an operational structure that brought agencies together under a unified situational picture, identified gaps in the federal response, and helped prevent the kind of inter-agency disputes over authority and resources that had characterized COVID-19’s early months. OPPR also coordinated with the U.S. Agency for International Development and international partners, ensuring that domestic and international response efforts were not working at cross-purposes.The mpox response also demonstrated OPPR’s capacity to work with the Strategic National Stockpile. ASPR manages the stockpile, but OPPR could identify the countermeasures needed, assess gaps between stockpile holdings and response requirements, and work across agencies to address those gaps before they became critical. This pre-positioned coordination work, done before an emergency requires maximum response speed, is precisely the kind of institutional function that has no visible constituency but proves its value when the emergency arrives.H5N1: The Most Consequential TestOPPR’s most sustained and consequential operational challenge involved the H5N1 avian influenza outbreak in American dairy cattle, which began in the spring of 2024 and remained an active concern at the time of the Trump administration’s transition. The H5N1 case illustrates both OPPR’s genuine operational value and the difficult policy questions that arise when a public health threat intersects with agricultural economics and individual liberty concerns.The outbreak presented an unusual interagency challenge. H5N1 is a pathogen that intersects animal health, human health, food safety, and agricultural economics. The United States Department of Agriculture, through its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, had primary authority over infected livestock and the federally mandated testing and movement controls for dairy cattle. The Food and Drug Administration was responsible for the safety of the commercial milk supply and had authority over pasteurization standards. The CDC tracked human cases among dairy workers and managed the public health surveillance infrastructure. The NIH drove the underlying research on viral characteristics, transmission dynamics, and vaccine development. The National Institutes of Health and BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, managed the medical countermeasure pipeline.No single agency had the authority or the visibility to coordinate all of these functions simultaneously. OPPR did. Beginning in March 2024, Director Friedrichs established daily interagency calls that brought together senior representatives from USDA, FDA, CDC, NIH, ASPR, HHS, and the VA. The calls moved to three times per week as the situation stabilized, and eventually to weekly. FDA Commissioner Robert Califf credited OPPR in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee for coordinating the response “at the highest level,” a recognition that the office was performing a function that no individual agency could replicate.Medical Countermeasures: The Moderna Contract and Vaccine DevelopmentOne of OPPR’s most significant specific accomplishments in the H5N1 response was its management of the medical countermeasure pipeline. Vaccine development for novel or mutating pathogens is unavoidably time-intensive. A pathogen can evolve from manageable to catastrophic in a matter of months. The only way to ensure a ready-to-deploy vaccine exists when it is needed is to fund the development work before the emergency arrives.OPPR coordinated two BARDA awards to Moderna totaling $766 million: an initial $176 million in July 2024 and a subsequent $590 million in January 2025, to develop mRNA-1018, an mRNA-based vaccine candidate against H5N1. The January award was specifically intended to fund a late-stage clinical trial that could have established the vaccine’s efficacy against pandemic influenza strains. OPPR also worked with BARDA to maintain a diverse portfolio of H5N1 vaccine candidates across multiple technology platforms, recognizing that any single vaccine program might encounter manufacturing, safety, or efficacy obstacles. The mRNA platform’s speed advantage, demonstrated during COVID-19, made it a particular priority for next-generation H5N1 preparedness.The Trump administration cancelled the full $766 million on May 28, 2025. The cancellation was announced the same day Moderna released positive interim Phase 1/2 data showing mRNA-1018 was well-tolerated and produced a rapid immune response in approximately 300 healthy adults, with 98 percent achieving antibody titers within three weeks of the second dose. HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon stated that continued investment was not scientifically or ethically justifiable, citing concerns about the mRNA platform’s safety profile and mounting evidence of adverse events associated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Nixon did not cite peer-reviewed literature in support of that characterization. Existing egg-based and cell-based H5N1 vaccine candidates remain in the federal pipeline.Beyond vaccines, OPPR coordinated with the VA and FEMA to maintain therapeutics in the Strategic National Stockpile for deployment if H5N1 transmission among humans increased. This included antivirals active against influenza strains, personal protective equipment for healthcare workers in dairy and poultry operations, and diagnostic capacity sufficient for rapid surge testing if human cases began to multiply. OPPR also worked with industry partners to pre-position manufacturing agreements to rapidly scale up countermeasure production if needed.The Government-Wide Countermeasure Mapping ProjectOne of OPPR’s most consequential long-term contributions was less visible than its crisis coordination work: a comprehensive, government-wide inventory of U.S. investments in medical countermeasures across all biological threat categories. Before this exercise, no single entity within the federal government had a complete picture of what medical countermeasures existed in the stockpile, what was in development across federal research programs, what gaps remained, and where the most urgent R&D priorities lay.The mapping project identified critical vulnerabilities, particularly in the pipeline for next-generation countermeasures against pathogens with pandemic potential. It revealed areas where federal investment was duplicative and areas where it was absent. The exercise helped OPPR redirect federal R&D priorities toward emerging threats, including H5N1, and established a framework for continuing this kind of systematic assessment. The resulting picture of the nation’s countermeasure portfolio was, in a meaningful sense, a national security asset: the United States could not effectively prepare for what it could not clearly inventory.The Bio-5 Alliance: International Supply Chain SecurityOPPR’s international work extended beyond coordination with foreign governments on disease surveillance. In June 2024, OPPR worked with the National Security Council to formally announce the Bio-5 Biopharmaceutical Alliance, a partnership among the United States, the European Union, Japan, India, and the Republic of Korea. The alliance’s inaugural meeting took place during the BIO International Convention in San Diego, the world’s largest biotechnology gathering, with government officials and private-sector representatives from all five parties in attendance. The coalition’s genesis traced to a bilateral dialogue between the United States and South Korea on core emerging technologies in December 2023; that conversation expanded to include Japan, India, and the EU as the scope of the supply chain problem became clear. The five members collectively represent the world’s major democratic pharmaceutical manufacturing economies, and notably India, the world’s largest generic drug producer and a primary source of active pharmaceutical ingredients for the U.S. market.COVID-19 demonstrated that a global pandemic does not simply create demand for medical countermeasures; it simultaneously disrupts the supply chains needed to manufacture and distribute them. Active pharmaceutical ingredients for many essential drugs are manufactured in a small number of countries, often concentrated in the People’s Republic of China. The inaugural Bio-5 meeting explicitly acknowledged this: participants recognized that essential raw materials and ingredients were concentrated in too few countries and agreed that reducing that concentration was a shared national security priority. The BIOSECURE Act, which sought to restrict Chinese biotech firms from integrating with the U.S. medical supply chain, reflected the same diagnosis on the legislative track.The Bio-5 Alliance’s political structure operates on a track 1.5 format, meaning that government officials and private industry representatives participate jointly, under the auspices of the NSC and OPPR on the U.S. side, with equivalent governmental counterparts from each member economy. This structure was chosen deliberately: supply chain resilience cannot be achieved by government mandates alone; it requires advance commitments from the pharmaceutical manufacturers, contract development and manufacturing organizations, and raw material suppliers who would actually execute diversified production arrangements. The format gives governments and industry a shared forum to align policy incentives with commercial investment decisions before a crisis makes that alignment urgent.The alliance’s mission tasks fell into four categories. First, supply chain mapping: member countries agreed to develop a comprehensive pharmaceutical supply chain map identifying critical nodes, concentration risks, and potential points of failure, beginning with active pharmaceutical ingredients sourced primarily from the PRC. Second, policy and regulatory harmonization: participants agreed to coordinate bio policies, regulations, and R&D support measures to reduce bureaucratic friction that impedes the surge capacity for cross-border manufacturing under emergency conditions. Third, joint R&D coordination: members committed to pooling resources and expertise to accelerate innovation, with particular attention to the gap between laboratory development and commercial-scale manufacturing that had hampered countermeasure deployment during COVID-19. Fourth, advance manufacturing agreements: the alliance sought to develop standing commitments for mutual production assistance that could be activated during declared emergencies, so that allied manufacturing capacity could be directed toward the most affected partner rather than commandeered by each government for purely domestic use. Whether the alliance survives the abandonment of OPPR, and whether the bilateral and multilateral relationships it established remain functional under the Trump administration’s different approach to allied health security coordination, is a question the available record does not yet answer.The Biological Incident Response PlaybookShortly before the Biden administration ended, OPPR completed the Playbook for Biological Incident Response, a formal interagency document developed in collaboration with the NSC’s Biosecurity and Pandemic Response directorate. The playbook operationalized the lessons of COVID-19 and the H5N1 response into a standing set of procedures for rapidly coordinating the U.S. government’s response to biological threats.The playbook specified decision authorities, communication protocols, agency roles and responsibilities, and escalation procedures across a range of biological threat scenarios. Critically, it established a common operational picture framework that would allow agencies to share situational awareness rapidly without the interagency disputes over data ownership and interpretation that had complicated the COVID-19 response. The Clade I Mpox response had served as a real-world validation of the playbook’s underlying framework; adjustments made during that response were incorporated into the final document.The playbook represents a specific kind of institutional asset that takes years to develop and can be destroyed in weeks. The interagency relationships, the shared vocabulary, the established protocols, the tested escalation procedures: these are not things that can be recreated rapidly under emergency conditions by officials who have never worked together through a functional preparedness structure. The value of the playbook is not the document itself. It is the institutional knowledge embedded in the people who developed it and who understand how to use it. Those people have left the government.Congressional Reporting and the Preparedness ReviewAmong OPPR’s statutory obligations were the biennial Preparedness Review and five-year Preparedness Outlook reports to Congress. OPPR prepared these reports under the Biden administration, delivering assessments that identified specific vulnerabilities in biosurveillance, supply chain resilience, medical countermeasure development, and international coordination. The reports reflected OPPR’s comprehensive countermeasure mapping work and provided Congress with a systematic basis for evaluating federal preparedness investments in appropriations proceedings.The reports are no longer being prepared. The statutory obligation exists. The office that would fulfill it does not exist in practice. Congress is therefore being denied information that an Act of Congress requires to be provided. This is not a minor compliance gap. The reporting requirement was the primary mechanism by which Congress could hold the executive branch accountable for the quality of its pandemic preparedness without waiting for the next emergency to reveal what the government had failed to do.A Congress that does not receive its statutorily required preparedness reports and does not respond to that failure with the tools available to it, including appropriations conditions, hearing subpoenas, and public accountability proceedings, is a Congress that has quietly acquiesced in the attrition of a function it created and mandated. The blame for the current state of OPPR is not the executive branch’s alone.Sources and NotesThis series draws on: court filings and discovery documents in Missouri v. Biden / Murthy v. Missouri (W.D. La. 2022, 5th Cir. 2023, S. Ct. 2024); the House Judiciary Committee’s report “The Censorship-Industrial Complex” (2024); Missouri Attorney General’s litigation documents; reporting by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, STAT News, the Washington Times, and National Review; testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (March 2024) and the House Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee (May 2024); official White House fact sheets and archived Biden White House pages; the Supreme Court’s opinion in Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43 (2024); the AEI op-ed co-authored by former OPPR staff (August 2025); and Think Global Health analysis of OPPR’s demise (2025). Direct quotations from emails are drawn from court documents and congressional records.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.SharePart 3 is titled “Dismantling by Attrition”The Trump Administration, the Death of OPPR, and the Reckoning Both Parties Have Avoided

Summary: The Creation of OPPR, the Constitutional Limits of Federal Health Authority, and What the Office Actually Accomplished


"Death to America"

Iran’s repeated calls for “Death to America” have long been its official slogan. An analysis of what that has meant reveals a clear, unmistakable pattern. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has not fought the United States in a conventional, declared war. Instead, it has waged a long, grinding campaign of asymmetric conflict: proxy warfare, terrorism, covert operations, and periodic direct strikes. In more recent decades, the steady advance of a nuclear program has entirely changed the strategic calculus.And the slogans do matter, because in this case, they are not incidental. The phrase “Death to America” (Persian:Marg bar Amrika) has functioned as an enduring piece of revolutionary political language inside Iran.“Death to America” has been chanted at state-organized events, embedded in official commemorations, and echoed by senior figures in the regime since the time of Ruhollah Khomeini. Iranian leaders have periodically argued that the phrase refers to opposition to U.S. policies rather than the American people. But whatever the semantic defense, it has remained part of the system’s political vocabulary for over four decades. “Death to America” is repeated in parliament, at rallies, and in state media. In that sense, it is not just street rhetoric. It has been normalized as part of the revolutionary “party line.”It began immediately. The 1979 embassy takeover in Tehran was not just a spontaneous student protest. It was endorsed and sustained by the revolutionary regime. Fifty-two American diplomats were held hostage for 444 days. That act alone reset U.S.–Iran relations for a generation and established the tone. This was not rhetoric. This was action.From there, the strategy evolved, but the objective did not.Iran built and cultivated proxy forces, most notably Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a Lebanon-based group founded in the 1980s with backing from Iran that operates simultaneously as a militia, a political party, and a social service network. It is widely regarded as Iran’s most important regional proxy, receiving funding, training, and weapons while advancing Iranian strategic interests.Hezbollah holds seats in Lebanon’s government but also maintains a powerful armed wing responsible for attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets, leading the United States Department of State and others to designate it as a terrorist organization.Iran’s proxy network is not abstract; it is built around a handful of core groups that do the regime’s work on the ground. Alongside Hezbollah, areHamasandPalestinian Islamic Jihadin Gaza, theHouthisin Yemen, and a cluster of Shia militias in Iraq, such asKata'ib Hezbollah. Different geographies, different sectarian roots, but the same pattern: funding, training, and strategic direction flowing from Iran, allowing it to project force, bleed adversaries, and maintain deniability without engaging in direct war.Through these proxies, Iran has struck American targets with plausible deniability. The 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. The Marine barracks bombing later that same year, which killed 241 American servicemen. The Khobar Towers bombing in 1996. These were not isolated incidents. They were part of a method. Iran does not need to pull the trigger if it can train, fund, and direct those who will.That model scaled. Over the past several decades, Iran has supported a network of aligned groups: Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Shia militias in Iraq, and more recently the Houthis in Yemen.What is often called the “axis of resistance” is not just a slogan. It is an operational framework. Through it, Iran has extended its reach across the Middle East, targeting U.S. personnel, facilities, and allies without engaging in open-state warfare.Nowhere has that been more evident than in Iraq. During the post-2003 conflict, Iran-backed militias were supplied with weapons, training, and increasingly sophisticated improvised explosive devices. U.S. officials have long attributed hundreds of American deaths to these groups. Again, not conventional war, but real casualties, real consequences.Over the last decade, and at sea, the pattern repeats. Iran has harassed U.S. naval vessels, mined shipping lanes, seized tankers, and threatened the free flow of commerce through the Strait of Hormuz. These actions are calibrated and aggressive enough to signal capability and intent, but often just below the threshold that would trigger full-scale retaliation.The line between proxy and direct action has blurred. Missile and drone attacks on U.S. bases in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria, have been attributed to Iran-backed groups, but in some cases bear the clear signature of Iranian planning and coordination. Retaliatory strikes following high-profile events have demonstrated both capability and willingness to escalate, at least to a point.Layered on top of this is a quieter, less visible campaign: cyber operations, intelligence work, and alleged assassination plots. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned of efforts to target American personnel, both abroad and within the United States.Presidential Assassination AttemptsIn 2024, federal prosecutors charged and later secured a conviction against an operative tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who had entered the United States to recruit hitmen for political assassinations, including Trump, though the plot was disrupted before any attack occurred. Additional cases and intelligence briefings have pointed to similar “kill team” concepts and surveillance efforts.What if that assassination attempt had been successful? Would we have gone to war with Iran then? Why did this assassination attempt and conviction hardly make headline news?A list of recent assassination attempts by Iran on American soil is listed at the end of the references for this article.And then there is the nuclear question.Iran’s nuclear program has advanced in fits and starts over decades, but the trajectory is unmistakable. Facilities such as Natanz Nuclear Facility and Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant have enabled uranium enrichment at increasingly higher levels. While Iran maintains that its program is for peaceful purposes, international monitoring bodies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, have repeatedly raised concerns about enrichment levels, transparency, and compliance.The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) temporarily constrained aspects of the program in exchange for sanctions relief. But following U.S. withdrawal in 2018 and subsequent Iranian steps away from compliance, enrichment levels increased, stockpiles grew, and monitoring became more limited. Today, Iran is widely assessed to be much closer to “breakout” capacity. That is the ability to produce more weapons-grade material on short notice than at any point in its history.Whether Iran intends to build a nuclear weapon remains officially unresolved. But capability matters. A near-threshold nuclear state operating alongside an established doctrine of proxy warfare and asymmetric conflict presents a fundamentally different level of risk.So when people ask whether the chant “Death to America” is just rhetoric, the historical record suggests otherwise. It has not translated into a conventional war. But it has been consistently accompanied by actions that impose real costs and, increasingly, by the development of capabilities that could dramatically raise the stakes.The better way to understand this is not as a series of disconnected events, but as a doctrine. Avoid direct confrontation. Use proxies. Maintain deniability. Apply pressure over time. Build strategic leverage.This is not noise. It is a strategy. It is covert warfare, fought over decades.The only questions that remain are… when is enough, enough?  And who is willing to support those who finally decide to take action after years of clear provocation?JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareReferencesU.S. Institute of Peace –Iran Primer(history, rhetoric, and state-sponsored events)Council on Foreign Relations – Iran–U.S. relations and conflict trackerCongressional Research Service – Reports on Iran’s military power and regional proxy networkU.S. Department of State – Country Reports on TerrorismDepartment of Defense – Statements on Iran-backed militia activityInternational Atomic Energy Agency – Safeguards and monitoring reports on IranArms Control Association – Iran nuclear program analysisBrookings Institution – Research on Iran’s regional strategyFoundation for Defense of Democracies – Analyses of Iran’s military and nuclear postureUnited Nations – Sanctions, resolutions, and nuclear oversight“Member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Charged with Plot to Murder the Former National Security Advisor” https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/member-irans-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps-irgc-charged-plot-murder-former-national?utm_source=chatgpt.comFoiled assassination plots and attempts on American soil (modern era):1. 2011: Saudi Ambassador plotU.S. officials alleged a plot tied to the Iranian government to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C. Iranian nationals Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri were charged with plotting to kill him at a restaurant using a bomb, and also discussed bombing the Saudi and Israeli embassies.Wikipedia2. 2021: Kidnapping of Masih AlinejadThe Justice Department charged four alleged Iranian intelligence operatives with trying to kidnap journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, with a plan to take her by speedboat to Venezuela and ultimately back to Iran to stand trial.NBC News3. 2022: Murder of Masih Alinejad (second attempt)Federal prosecutors charged three members of an Eastern European criminal organization with trying to kill Alinejad. She survived because she failed to answer her door in Brooklyn when a man with an assault rifle rang the bell. He left, ran a stop sign, and was arrested — unraveling the plot.NBC News4. 2022: Plot to kill John BoltonFederal prosecutors charged IRGC member Shahram Poursafi with trying to hire assassins to kill former White House National Security Advisor John Bolton for $300,000. He also had a second unnamed target he was willing to pay up to $1 million to have killed.Fox News5. 2024: Plot targeting Trump, Biden, and Nikki HaleyIRGC-linked operative Asif Merchant was sent to the U.S. and directed to arrange the murders of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Nikki Haley. He met with supposed hitmen who were actually undercover FBI agents in New York, and was arrested in July 2024.CBS News6. 2024: Separate Trump assassination plot (Farhad Shakeri)The DOJ announced charges against Farhad Shakeri, an IRGC asset in Tehran, who was told by IRGC officials to focus solely on Trump and formulate a plan within seven days. Two American co-conspirators in New York were also charged for allegedly helping surveil targets.CNNOther threats and targeted individuals:Other officials placed on Iran’s hit list include former National Security Advisors John Bolton and Robert O’Brien, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, General Kenneth McKenzie, and former Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook, all of whom reportedly required Secret Service protection long after leaving their posts.

Summary: Iran's Covert War


Inside The Public Good Projects

Inside The Public Good ProjectsHow a single public health nonprofit became a hub of weaponized pandemic-era “misinformation” monitoring, and what its program portfolio actually contained.An investigative summary | Drawing on PGP’s own published materials, peer-reviewed publications, UNICEF and CDC Foundation disclosures, The Intercept, and the Twitter Files. Full bibliography at the end.Most observers of pandemic-era information policy have heard of one or another piece of the apparatus. The Stanford Virality Project, the CDC Foundation’s Partnering for Vaccine Equity, the BIO-funded “Stronger” campaign, the rapid-response Shots Heard network: each has its own story. Fewer have noticed that a single small New York-based nonprofit sat at or near the center of nearly all of them.That nonprofit is The Public Good Projects, or PGP. Founded in 2013 and granted 501(c)(3) status in 2014, PGP describes itself as a public health organization “specializing in large-scale media monitoring programs, social and behavior change interventions, and cross-sector initiatives” [1]. By the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was operating a portfolio of programs whose combined reach across federal agencies, multinational institutions, pharmaceutical trade groups, and major social media platforms was substantially larger than any single one of its programs would suggest.This is an attempt to map that portfolio.I. The OrganizationPGP is led by Joe Smyser, PhD, MSPH, who completed postdoctoral training at the CDC before joining the organization. By 2024 PGP’s public materials described it as designer of “some of the United States’ most influential and impactful health campaigns to date in partnership with the CDC, FDA, Kaiser Permanente, Rockefeller, and Humana” [2]. The organization’s campaigns have spanned vaccine confidence, mental health, the opioid crisis, reproductive health, tobacco control, school nutrition, and domestic violence. In the aggregate, this portfolio places PGP within a comparatively small group of nonprofits operating at this scale and reach.PGP’s funder list, drawn from its own published materials, IRS filings, and grantee profiles, includes the Rockefeller Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, the New York State Health Foundation, UNICEF, the National Governors Association, Public Health Communications Collaborative, the West Orange Health District, the Allyn Family Foundation, Google, and, most controversially in retrospect, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the trade association whose members include Pfizer and Moderna [3][4].It is the breadth of this funder mix, combined with the fact that PGP routinely operated programs that were technically distinct yet practically braided, that makes the organization itself, rather than any single one of its programs, the more illuminating unit of analysis.II. Project VCTR: The Listening LayerPGP’s foundational program in this domain is Project VCTR (“Vaccine Communication Tracking Resource”), launched in 2019. By PGP’s own description, Project VCTR is “the nation’s largest vaccine communications monitoring program,” in use by more than 500 health organizations at one count and over 1,200 at another [2]. Its function is social listening at scale, continuously monitoring online conversations across platforms to identify trends, networks, and emerging narratives related to vaccines, with particular attention to vaccine hesitancy and opposition.Project VCTR is the substrate beneath much of what PGP did during the pandemic. It is the surveillance and analytics layer; everything that follows draws on the data it generates: advocacy campaigns, content-moderation flagging, training programs, and rapid-response networks.The program is presented in PGP’s materials and in commissioned overviews for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as a tool of “infodemic management” [5]. That phrase, borrowed from the World Health Organization, is doing significant work. It frames the monitoring of online conversations about a public health intervention as a public health activity in itself, rather than as a form of intelligence-gathering on private speech. Whether one accepts that framing largely determines how one views everything else, PGP did.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.III. The Vaccination Demand ObservatoryIn April 2021, PGP partnered with UNICEF and the Yale Institute for Global Health to launch the Vaccination Demand Observatory, a global extension of the Project VCTR model. Per the joint press release: “To combat vaccine hesitancy worldwide, PGP, UNICEF and Yale Institute for Global Health launched the Vaccination Demand Observatory today… [It] is developing tools, training, technical support and research to equip in-country teams to mitigate the impact of misinformation and mistrust on all vaccines” [6].The Observatory established social listening programs across UNICEF country offices, with first on-the-ground deployment in multiple West African countries supporting UNICEF polio teams. It also published the multilingual Vaccine Misinformation Management Field Guide in December 2020, which provided national governments and NGOs with a structured methodology for “rapidly countering vaccine misinformation and building demand for vaccination” [6].This is the same template as Project VCTR (listen at scale, identify hostile narratives, develop counter-messaging) but operating at the scale of a UN agency’s global footprint. It is an instructive example of how a relatively small American nonprofit’s methodology became, through an institutional partnership, an instrument of global vaccine communications policy.IV. Stronger: The Advocacy EngineStronger was launched by PGP in July 2020, six months into the pandemic and several months before any COVID-19 vaccine was authorized. PGP’s own announcement described it as “a first-of-its-kind national advocacy campaign against misinformation and for vaccines” [7]. Unlike Project VCTR, which was monitoring infrastructure, Stronger was action-oriented: “the campaign will show people how to block, hide, and report misinformation. People can also report to the campaign, and it will do it for them”[7].In other words, Stronger was a crowdsourced content-flagging operation. Members of the public could report content they considered misinformation, and Stronger would then route those reports through to the relevant platforms. The campaign also used social network analysis to identify “falsehoods on the verge of going viral” and to direct support to clinicians under attack online for promoting vaccines [7].Stronger was funded by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the pharmaceutical industry trade association representing Pfizer, Moderna, and other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers. According to internal Twitter records released after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform and reported by Lee Fang in The Intercept, BIO provided $1,275,000 to Stronger over the course of the campaign [8]. PGP CEO Joe Smyser, in his on-record interview with Fang, characterized the funding arrangement as follows: “BIO contributed money and said, ‘You guys are planning on running a pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine misinformation effort and we will give you $500,000 [per year] no questions asked’” [8].The internal records showed that PGP’s engagement with Twitter under the Stronger umbrella went well beyond simple content reports. According to Fang’s reporting, PGP staff worked with Twitter to help develop automated tools for moderating vaccine-related content; sent regular emails to Twitter’s trust-and-safety team containing lists of accounts and tweets recommended for action; influenced which public health accounts received platform verification; and maintained a direct line of communication with the Twitter lobbyist who served as the company’s point of contact with the Biden administration [8].Some of what Stronger flagged was straightforward. Other items were not. Fang’s reporting noted at least one tweet that posed a policy question about vaccine passports given the Delta variant’s transmission characteristics among vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, a question being openly debated in the public health and bioethics literature at the time. A February 2022 PGP email to Twitter, included in the published reporting, attached a “misinfo report” acknowledging that the New York Times articles in question “do not contain misinformation themselves but are using the news to further prove the CDC is untrustworthy,” and recommending action regardless [8].V. ThisIsOurShot and VacúnateYa: The Trusted-Messenger LayerWhere Stronger operated as a flagging-and-takedown engine, ThisIsOurShot and VacúnateYa operated as their inverse: amplification networks built around trained physician messengers. Both were national grassroots campaigns coordinated by PGP, designed (in the language of a 2023 Annals of Internal Medicine case study authored by their leadership) “to spread accurate health information on social media and address false information” [9].The case study describes a model in which 15 medical professionals partnered with more than 60 organizations to build a diverse team of clinician messengers, train them in social media engagement, monitor viral rumors and false information online, design counter-messaging, and engage with both digital and in-person communities [9]. ThisIsOurShot received institutional backing from the American Medical Association and the National Association of Manufacturers, among others; VacúnateYa was its Hispanic-community counterpart [10].In structural terms, the relationship to Project VCTR is again the operative one. The trusted-messenger campaigns drew on PGP’s monitoring infrastructure to identify what to push back against, and the trained messengers then provided the human face of the response.VI. Shots Heard Round the World: One Program Among ManyShots Heard Round the World is the program that has drawn the most public attention, partly because of its origin story (the 2017 anti-vaccine harassment campaign against Kids Plus Pediatrics in Pittsburgh) and partly because its co-founder Dr. Todd Wolynn became one of the more visible public faces of pro-vaccine advocacy during the pandemic [11].In the larger PGP architecture, however, Shots Heard occupied a relatively narrow operational lane. It was the rapid-response defense arm: a vetted, private network of clinician volunteers, organized through a closed Facebook group and listserv, that activated when an individual healthcare provider, practice, or hospital came under coordinated anti-vaccine attack online. Volunteers would post pro-vaccine content on the targeted page to draw attackers away, report harassing accounts and fraudulent reviews to platforms, and coach the targeted provider on bulk-blocking and moderation tools. The organization’s Toolkit, distributed in four languages, codified this methodology [12][13].Wolynn, after Shots Heard was folded into PGP’s portfolio, took the title Executive Director of PGP’s Trusted Messenger Program. That title placed him in a leadership role across multiple PGP programs simultaneously [14].It is worth being precise here. Shots Heard’s own published activity was reactive defense of identifiable victims, not proactive misinformation surveillance. The proactive surveillance and flagging operation was Stronger. The trusted-messenger amplification network was ThisIsOurShot and VacúnateYa. The monitoring substrate beneath all of them was Project VCTR. Shots Heard was one program in a portfolio: the visible defensive piece of an infrastructure whose other components were less visible but, in policy terms, considerably more consequential.VII. The CDC Foundation PipelineRunning parallel to its industry-funded work, PGP became a sub-grantee of the CDC Foundation under the agency’s Partnering for Vaccine Equity (P4VE) program. A peer-reviewed Journal of Community Health article authored by PGP staff disclosed the funding structure verbatim: “The project was funded by the CDC Foundation under a financial assistance award supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) totaling $25,660,048 with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS” [15].Under this funding, PGP partnered with the Hispanic Communications Network and World Voices Media on a multifaceted campaign to address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Hispanic communities. The campaign, called El Beacon, had its digital-volunteer methodology written up in the Health Promotion Practice journal [16]. The methodology was familiar: monitor misinformation in the relevant linguistic and demographic space, recruit and train volunteer messengers, deploy counter-messaging, evaluate outcomes.The CDC Foundation, established by Congress as the “sole entity authorized” to raise private funds for the CDC [17], occupies an unusual structural position. It is a 501(c)(3) public charity, formally independent of the CDC, but its programmatic activity is tightly coordinated with the agency’s public health priorities. When CDC dollars flow through it to organizations like PGP, the funds carry both federal authority and the operational flexibility of private grant-making. For an organization simultaneously receiving pharmaceutical-industry money, this represents a particularly clean way of holding both relationships at once.VIII. The Moderna EngagementPGP’s direct engagement with Moderna emerged in 2024 in a series of investigative reports by Lee Fang, drawing on internal Moderna documents and what he called the “Moderna Reports” [18]. According to the reporting, Moderna contracted with PGP and a network of former public health officials and law enforcement consultants on a coordinated misinformation-response operation that included an Infodemic Training Program reaching approximately 45,000 healthcare professionals and AI-driven monitoring of online conversations involving named public figures.Among those reportedly subject to such monitoring were comedian Russell Brand, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), and journalists Michael Shellenberger and Alex Berenson. According to the underlying documents, in some cases the monitoring was triggered not by specific false claims but by the figures’ reach and influence within COVID-skeptical audiences. PGP, which received funding from BIO during the same period, also figured in the reporting as a coordinator of social-media flagging activity that, per Fang, sometimes targeted material the organization itself acknowledged was not factually false but was deemed to undermine trust in CDC guidance [18].IX. The Architecture, in SumViewed as a whole rather than program by program, PGP’s pandemic-era operation looked roughly like this:• Project VCTR provided continuous social-listening surveillance across the U.S. domestic information environment.• The Vaccination Demand Observatory extended that surveillance globally through UNICEF’s country-office network.• Stronger, funded by the pharmaceutical industry’s trade association, turned that surveillance into action by sending lists of accounts and tweets to Twitter’s trust-and-safety team and helping develop the platform’s automated content-moderation tools.• ThisIsOurShot and VacúnateYa amplified counter-messaging through trained physician messengers.• Shots Heard Round the World provided rapid defensive response when individual clinicians came under coordinated attack.• The El Beacon campaign, funded through the CDC Foundation with federal CDC/HHS dollars, applied the same methodology to Hispanic communities at a cost of $25.66 million.• A direct Moderna engagement, separately reported, layered AI-driven surveillance and 45,000-person training onto the existing infrastructure.These programs were legally distinct, separately funded, and presented to the public under different brand names. They shared a single organizational home, a single operational methodology, and substantially overlapping leadership and staff.X. The Open QuestionsSeveral questions about PGP’s pandemic-era activity remain unresolved in the public record.First, the line between “misinformation” and “material that undermines trust” appears to have been managed inconsistently across PGP programs. Stronger’s own February 2022 communications acknowledged flagging articles that were not factually false [8]. The Stanford Virality Project, which operated alongside PGP-style efforts and used similar methodologies, was later shown to have flagged true vaccine-side-effect testimonials and legitimate policy criticism [19]. How often PGP itself crossed similar lines, in which programs, and at whose direction: these are questions the public record does not yet resolve.Second, the structural conflict of interest involved in receiving pharmaceutical-industry trade-association funding to monitor and flag online speech about pharmaceutical-industry products has not been adequately addressed by PGP itself, by the platforms that accepted its work product, or by the federal agencies whose programs ran in parallel. Smyser’s public statement that PGP “never flagged or focused on any drug industry content” [8] is a partial answer. It does not address whether the absence of such flagging was itself a function of who paid for the work.Third, the institutional convergence raises governance questions that pandemic-era institutional review has largely avoided. A UN agency, a federal foundation, a pharmaceutical industry trade group, multiple major social-media platforms, and an academic institution all routed work through a single small nonprofit. The convergence may have been efficient. It may also have been precisely the kind of structural arrangement that public-private partnership frameworks are normally designed to prevent.ConclusionThe Public Good Projects is not the largest player in the pandemic-era information landscape, nor is it the most familiar to the general public. But it is one of the more revealing ones, precisely because its program portfolio sits at the intersection of nearly every funding stream and institutional partner that mattered: federal agencies and their congressionally chartered foundation, the United Nations system, a major pharmaceutical-industry trade association, individual pharmaceutical manufacturers, leading social-media platforms, and one of the most prominent academic centers studying digital communication.Shots Heard Round the World, the program most often cited in critical accounts, was a single visible piece of a substantially larger structure. Understanding that structure, including its funding, its methodology, and its institutional reach, is a precondition for any serious assessment of how the pandemic-era misinformation-response apparatus actually worked, who paid for it, and what its consequences were.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareBibliography[1]The Public Good Projects. (n.d.). “About PGP.”publicgoodprojects.org. https://www.publicgoodprojects.org/[2]National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media. (2021). “Dr. Joe Smyser, PhD, MSPH, Speaker Profile.” https://www.nchcmm.org/index.php/socialdeterminants?view=article&id=58&catid=11 (Description of Project VCTR as “the nation’s largest vaccine communications monitoring program.”)[3]InfluenceWatch. (2024). “Public Goods Project.” Capital Research Center. https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/public-goods-project/ (Funder list, including Rockefeller Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, Google, NYS Health Foundation, BIO, and others.)[4]New York Health Foundation. (2019). “Grantee Profile: The Public Good Projects, Inc.” https://nyhealthfoundation.org/grantee/the-public-good-projects-inc/[5]The Vaccination Demand Observatory. (n.d.). “Resources.” https://www.thevdo.org/resources (NASEM workshop overview describing Project VCTR and the VDO as infodemic-management tools.)[6]UNICEF, Yale Institute for Global Health, and The Public Good Projects. (2021, April 29). “Vaccination Demand Observatory launched to strengthen local communication programmes to address vaccine misinformation.” Joint press release. https://www.unicef.org/eap/press-releases/vaccination-demand-observatory-launched-strengthen-local-communication-programmes[7]The Public Good Projects. (2020, July 15). “National Public Health Campaign Designed to Mobilize Support of Vaccines.” PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/national-public-health-campaign-designed-to-mobilize-support-of-vaccines-301093876.html (Stronger campaign launch announcement; “supported by PGP, BIO, and individual donors.”)[8]Fang, L. (2023, January 16). “Covid-19 Drugmakers Pressured Twitter to Censor Activists Pushing for Generic Vaccine.”The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2023/01/16/twitter-covid-vaccine-pharma/ (BIO funding of $1,275,000 to PGP’s Stronger campaign; Joe Smyser on-record interview; February 2022 PGP-to-Twitter email regarding NYT articles “not misinformation themselves.”)[9]Bhatt, J., Nakhasi, A., McDonald, A., et al. (2023). “The ThisIsOurShot and VacúnateYa Case Study,” reporting on national grassroots organizations spreading accurate health information on social media.Annals of Internal Medicine. (Coverage and citations via PGP LinkedIn announcement and case-study companion materials, bit.ly/TIOSVYCaseStudy.)[10]American Medical Association. (2021, February 5). “#ThisIsOurShot elevates physicians’ voices supporting vaccines.” AMA COVID-19 Daily Update. https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/thisisourshot-elevates-physicians-voices-supporting-vaccines[11]Wolynn, T., & Hermann, C. (2021). “Shots heard round the world: better communication holds the key to increasing vaccine acceptance.”Nature Immunology, 22(9), 1068–1070. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-00998-y[12]Hoffman, B. L., Felter, E. M., Chu, K.-H., Shensa, A., Hermann, C., Wolynn, T., et al. (2021). “#DoctorsSpeakUp: Lessons learned from a pro-vaccine Twitter event.”Vaccine, 39(19). PMC9351384. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9351384/[13]Shots Heard Round the World. (2021).Shots Heard Toolkit: How Health Care Professionals Can Prepare For and Defend Against an Anti-Vaccination Attack. Vaccine Resource Hub. https://vaccineresourcehub.org/resource/toolkit-how-health-care-professionals-can-prepare-and-defend-against-anti-vaccination[14]HealthDefend. (n.d.). “About.”HealthDefend.com. https://www.healthdefend.com/about (PGP as parent organization for Shots Heard, ThisIsOurShot, VacúnateYa, and Health Defend.)[15]Dunn Silesky, M., Panchal, D., Bonnevie, E., et al. (2022). “A Multifaceted Campaign to Combat COVID-19 Misinformation in the Hispanic Community.”Journal of Community Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10900-022-01170-9 (CDC Foundation award disclosure: $25,660,048, 100% funded by CDC/HHS.)[16]The Public Good Projects. (2024). “Digital Volunteers as Trusted Public Health Communicators.”Health Promotion Practice(Practice Note, El Beacon campaign methodology). Citation via PGP’s announcement on LinkedIn and journal publication.[17]CDC Foundation. (n.d.). “FAQ” and “Partners.”cdcfoundation.org. https://www.cdcfoundation.org/FAQ (Established by Congress; sole entity authorized to raise private funds in support of CDC; partnership and conflict-of-interest framework.)[18]Fang, L. (2024, January 16). “Exposed: Moderna’s Vaccine Against Vaccine Dissent.”RealClearInvestigations; companion reporting on Lee Fang Substack (leefang.com). https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/01/16/how_moderna_came_up_with_a_vaccine_against_vaccine_dissent_1004781.html (Reporting on Moderna’s contracts with PGP, the Infodemic Training Program reaching approximately 45,000 health care professionals, and AI-driven surveillance of figures including Russell Brand, Sen. Rand Paul, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Berenson.)[19]Taibbi, M. (2023, March 17). “Twitter Files #19: The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine, Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of ‘True Stories.’”Racket News / Twitter Files. (Reporting on Stanford’s Virality Project flagging of true vaccine-side-effect testimonials and legitimate policy criticism as ‘misinformation.’)[20]Aspen Ideas Festival. (n.d.). “Joseph Smyser, CEO, The Public Good Projects.” Speaker biography. https://www.aspenideas.org/speakers/joseph-smyser (Smyser’s description of PGP’s portfolio, including Project VCTR, the Vaccination Demand Observatory, and Stronger.)[21]Hoffman, J. (2020, February 4). “A Call to Arms: Under Attack, Pro-Vaccine Doctors Fight Back.”The New York Times; reprinted via Pennsylvania Immunization Coalition. https://immunizepa.org/a-call-to-arms-under-attack-pro-vaccine-doctors-fight-back/ (Origin of Shots Heard Round the World; Bigford and Baldwin rescue cases.)[22]Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Continuing Medical Education. (n.d.). “Todd Wolynn, MD, Faculty Bio.” https://cme.nicklauschildrens.org/node/2327/bio/4466/view (Wolynn co-founded Shots Heard, now operated by The Public Good Projects.)Note on sourcing: Where this piece relies on internal Twitter communications, those communications were reviewed and reported by Lee Fang under access granted by Twitter’s post-acquisition leadership. Fang has stated that searches were conducted by a Twitter attorney on his behalf, meaning the available record may be incomplete. Where this piece relies on tax disclosures, IRS Form 990 filings for The Public Good Projects, Inc. and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization were the underlying source. Where this piece relies on PGP’s own statements about its programs and funding, those statements come from PGP’s public materials, press releases, and the on-record interview given by CEO Joe Smyser to The Intercept.

Summary: How a single public health nonprofit became a hub of weaponized pandemic-era misinformation monitoring, and what its program portfolio actually contained.