On Wednesday, July 29, Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — subpoenaed, sworn, and silent. Within minutes of the gavel he read a statement accusing Chairman Rand Paul of running a prosecution in search of a crime, and then delivered the line he would repeat, by reporters’ count, more than four dozen times in the first two hours:

“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment.”

Fauci has testified before Congress more than 250 times across nearly four decades. This was the first time he took the Fifth.

Two weeks earlier, on July 15, Jay Bhattacharya sat down with Marissa Streit for an hour on PragerU’s Real Talk. No subpoena. No counsel. No carve-outs. He is the sitting Director of the National Institutes of Health and Acting Director of the CDC — the most legally exposed chair in American public health — and he answered every question put to him, including the ones with his own agencies’ fingerprints on them.

Put the two transcripts side by side and you have the whole story of the last six years in one frame.

What silence sounds like

Let’s be precise about what Fauci declined to discuss, because the list is the indictment.

He would not answer about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. He would not answer about gain-of-function research. He would not answer whether he misled Congress about either. And — this is the part worth sitting with — he would not answer a procedural question about documents.

Other exchanges were more personal and frustrating but damning to Dr. Fauci.

Paul’s predicate for the subpoena was two emails. On February 2, 2020 — one day after the now-infamous call that produced “Proximal Origins” — Fauci wrote to then-NIH Director Francis Collins about getting ahead of “the science and narrative” of the virus’s origins, and closed with: “Please delete this e-mail after you read it.” On July 20, 2020, he sent his chief of staff a message disparaging Paul, with the same instruction attached.

In 2024, under oath, Fauci denied deleting records or obstructing anything.

Paul’s response to the Biden pardon, which blankets Fauci from 2014 through January 2025, was the sharpest thing said in the room: a pardon “does not convert a misleading statement to a truthful one.” He closed with a promise — “There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.”

Set aside whether you think a preemptive pardon was justified. Notice the structure it created. The pardon removed the legal jeopardy for everything already done. The Fifth Amendment now removes the obligation to describe it. Between the two, the entire record of how American pandemic policy was made has been walled off from the only body empowered to examine it.

That is not a legal technicality. That is an accountability vacuum with a constitutional roof over it.

What openness sounds like

Now the other transcript.

Bhattacharya opens the PragerU interview by describing 2020 as the year his career stopped mattering to him — he watched children locked out of school, he opposed the mandates, he got canceled for it. “I thought my career was over,” he says. “And now I’m the director of the National Institutes of Health.”

He was blacklisted on Twitter at the government’s request. He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, the document Francis Collins famously demanded a “quick and devastating published takedown” of on October 8, 2020 — a takedown organized from inside the very building Bhattacharya now runs.

And here is what he says, in public, unprompted, about the institution he inherited:

“Most scientists and people in public health — if they’re honest — recognize the colossal failures that happened of science and public health during that era.”

He names the damage without hedging: kids out of school for two and three years and still behind, the economic hangover, and — a phrase no NIH director has ever uttered — “all the people that suffered from vaccine injuries that are unacknowledged.”

On the mandate-era claim that started the whole censorship apparatus, he is blunter than any of his critics predicted he would dare be as a sitting director:

“Does the COVID vaccine stop you from getting and spreading COVID? I can see and you can see that it doesn’t — but it’s a peer-reviewed journal that says that it does.”

Asked directly about reports of a 235-word screening list at NIH, he doesn’t spin it, doesn’t refer it to comms, doesn’t say the report is under review:

“I am deeply against banned word lists. I don’t believe in them. I will not have my institution embrace them.”

He explains that grant-screening tools use keywords and that a human reads what they flag — and that in many cases the reviewer discovers the DEI language was camouflage, tacked on by researchers who had learned that “in order to get a grant, you have to pretend to be doing DEI and then you’d secretly be doing good science underneath.”

Read that twice. The Director of the NIH just described his own agency’s recent grant regime as a system that taught American scientists to lie in order to work.

The reversal is structural, not rhetorical

Anyone can hold a press conference about restoring trust. What separates this from the usual Washington penance tour is that Bhattacharya is dismantling the specific machinery that produced the failure.

The replication crisis. He puts the number on the table: “60% of the time, 70% of the time, the published biomedical research literature is not reliable.” Methods aren’t described clearly, datasets aren’t available, tissue samples aren’t available. So NIH is now funding replication work as first-class science, standing up an NIH journal that publishes replication studies with the peer reviews attached in public, rebuilding literature search so a paper displays every study that tested the same idea instead of the prestige of its masthead, and building metrics that reward sharing data and code.

The safety trap in peer review. He and a Stanford colleague indexed every new word and phrase in the biomedical literature since 1940 to date how old the ideas in a given paper are. The finding: in the 1980s, NIH-funded researchers published ideas zero to two years old. By the 2000s and 2010s, seven to eight years old. The agency had quietly optimized for will this work over will this disrupt — partly because you had to already hold a large NIH grant to sit on a study section, which means the incumbent reviews the insurgent. The fix, which he concedes has a boring name, is the uniform funding strategy: institute directors are now pushed to read the full review rather than rank by a composite score that mostly predicts publishability. “I fundamentally don’t care if a project gets a paper in a journal,” he says. “I care if the project disrupts science.”

Epistemology. This is the deepest cut, and it’s the one that indicts the Fauci-Collins era most directly without ever naming it. Bhattacharya reaches for Galileo — the first scientific revolution wasn’t about telescopes, it was about stripping ecclesiastical authorities of the power to rule on physical reality. Then:

“Why is it that a relatively small number of people, in a very non-transparent way, get to decide for all of society what’s true or false about physical reality?”

That is a description of 2020 and 2021 written as a philosophy lecture. The Proximal Origins paper was an ecclesiastical ruling. The GBD takedown was an ecclesiastical ruling. The blacklist was enforcement.

Mandates. On childhood vaccines he refuses both scripts. He defends MMR and DPT as essential and says so plainly. He also says every medicine has a benefit and a harm, that we owe something to the people harmed, that the COVID shot isn’t necessary for most kids, and that the schedule has been shifted toward a European model with Secretary Kennedy. Then the sentence that is the entire argument of the last six years compressed into fourteen words:

“It’s not going to be a universal take-it-or-else. You have no trust.”

The same chair, six years apart

Here is the juxtaposition, stated as plainly as it deserves.

The men who built the policy will not describe it — one is pardoned and silent, the other authored the takedown email and has never sat for a hearing like Wednesday’s at all. The man they tried to erase now holds the chair, and cannot stop describing it: the failures, the injuries, the censorship, the rot in peer review, the flatlined life expectancy, his own agency’s capture.

One era is protected by counsel. The other is conducted on camera, for an hour, with the tape running.

Bhattacharya was asked what success looks like in twenty years. Not a Nobel, he said. Not a citation count. Reverse the longevity flatline. People living longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives. “That’s the measure.”

It is a modest answer from a man who was told his career was over for saying children should be in school.

Fauci had four dozen chances Wednesday to say something equally modest. He took the Fifth instead.

Quotes from Dr. Bhattacharya are drawn from “Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on Depoliticizing the NIH and Ushering in a New Era of Scientific Innovation,” Real Talk with Marissa Streit, PragerU, July 15, 2026, lightly cleaned of verbal stumbles. Hearing quotes and details are from contemporaneous reporting on the July 29, 2026 Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing (STAT, TIME, Boston Globe, Axios) and from Chairman Paul’s own committee release on the February 2 and July 20, 2020 emails.

JUST. TURN. AROUND. FAUCI!

(he had to consult his lawyers)

Excerpts from Prologue & Chapter 2

“Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices.”

- 2 Corinthians 2:11 (KJV)

Hell keeps minutes.

This will surprise those who imagine the place as fire and shrieking, all fiercely carnivirous, all chaos, no administration. The letters in this book should cure that misconseption. Whatever else those years were, and they were many things, including a real plague with real dead, they were also, below, a project: scoped, staffed, minuted, and reviewed. Great evil is seldom loud. It is procedural. It files away everything, and you never noticed.

How this file surfaced I will not fully explain, partly to protect what must still be protected, mostly because I cannot for fear of retribution. I can say that the letters arrived the way everything true about those years arrived: late, out of order, in pieces, and through the very procedures that had been built to bury such things. Call it a leak if you like. Call it, as the lawyers say, production assets. Somewhere in the middle of the correspondence, the senior devil assures his nephew that his own records are kept in the one archive that has never seen the light of day. You are holding the reply. This are the pantheon fruits of our FOIA request.

The file is incomplete, these type of files always are, and where the gaps fall, I have left them; the silences of devils are instructive too. The books, we are promised, get opened in the end. Regard this as an early draft, a forgotten manuscript.

What you hold, then, is the working correspondence of two devils. The elder, Screwtape, has seen plagues enough to find them boring. The younger, talented, careerist, anxious for commendation, signs himself Dr. F., Undersecretary for Respiratory Affairs. Readers who come hunting a particular face behind the initial will leave unsatisfied, and should. Hell assigns specific desks with like-minded biographies. The Undersecretary is a post, a titular honorarium and these denoted pedastals outlive their occupants. Or more likely, their occupants have stepped off.

Notice, as you read, what the two of them almost never discuss: the virus. It drifts through these pages as weather, a thing that happened to be happening. Their professional interest was never the disease, but what fear it could instill. Their focus is always how the virus could be spun into action, what the virus could be taught to do, to love, to truth, to worship, to children, to memory, to the face across the table.

Their patient was never the sick man. It was you.

Two notes on method, because the book asks something of its reader.

First: devils on the record praise what should appall them and dread what should be cherished, so everything here arrives upside down and must be read in a mirror. When the correspondents gloat, someone was being broken. When they grow uneasy and sense the event horizons: quiet houses, mothers doing arithmetic, men who frame the letters that ended their careers, any two witnesses comparing notes, you have found the exact coordinates where the light was getting in. Their contempt is a map. I know no better index of what actually mattered in those years than the short list of things these two feared.

Second: do not cite these letters as history. Devils are indifferent to facts and say so with pride; the figures they spout to one another prove nothing and were never meant to. But a devil reporting to a devil about the work cannot afford to lie about the work; Hell audits, and so the correspondence is unreliable about every number and unimpeachable about every untoward intention. Cite nothing. Recognize everything.

And you will recognize it. That is the last thing to say, and the reason the book exists. The famous rooms are mostly offstage here. The files return, instead, to kitchens, thresholds, classrooms, group chats, parish halls, nursing-home windows, the seating of dinner tables, because that, by the devils’ own accounting, is where the era was actually decided, and theirs is the one accounting in this matter I have come to trust. Few readers will get far without meeting a letter they wrote, or received, or chose, gently, with sorrowful wording, not to send. I met several of mine. I finished anyway, and I mention it only because the devils, late in the file, name the last weapon they keep for the day when all the others have been blunted: the tiredness of readers.

So read it rested. Take it slowly; it was done to you slowly. And when you have finished, do the one thing this correspondence fears from its first page to its last: say what you saw, plainly, out loud, to someone near.

It was always the nearness they were after.

Chapter 2 - The Mask: Symbol of Submission

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene VII

Letter VI - Dr. F. to Screwtape

My Dear Uncle,

A boy in my sector is learning to talk this year. Unfortunately for him, the human mouths he would mimic are covered, his teacher’s, the grocer’s, the better part of his mother’s day, and so he is doing his best with eyebrows. I open with this small impact as a touchpoint of the season’s inventory, and the season, Uncle, is this: the free citizens of the West have covered their faces. I ask you to sit with that sentence a moment, as I have. No conqueror ever managed it. Mohammed came close but we triumphed in covering the male counterparts as well! You said the mask deserved a letter of its own; it has since earned a volume.

Their litany to date has been: a frightened spring, a bulbous chart, a quiet fortnight renewing itself, the cadence your last letter described, and then this: the faces of the West withdrawn from circulation, like a currency recalled.

Understand what we have and have not issued. A temporary measure is simply a tool with a date on it. This has no date, but it has acquired a meaning: it is a confession of virtue, worn in public, the first garment in living memory that announces the wearer’s morality at fifty yards. Lockdown was a intangible policy of shut doors; a man could pace his floor for weeks and resent it privately. The mask is a tangible policy of the person. It rides the breath, tugs at the ears, dampens against the lip. It is a policy they can feel against their skin, and that discomfort is now rehearsed hourly.

First, I must also report a complication which I believe we have successfully converted into an asset. Our opening messages, you will recall, discouraged the flimsy cloth, not needed by the well, reserved only for the wards. Then the doctrine reversed, and the article became sacred. I braced for damage; hypocrisy is the one charge the laity can prosecute without counsel. The damage did not come. The reversal was absorbed, retailed to the public as the science evolving. Absorbed, Uncle, is the word I adore here, because absorption is the product. To obey a stable rule, a man needs only obedience. To obey a rule that has reversed, he must surrender his memory of the rule before, must agree, in some back room of his head, that what was said was never quite said. Practice this twice and the faculty that compares yesterday with today learns to ask for instructions before it speaks tomorrow. You will remember my anxieties regarding comparison. We are now manufacturing the antidote, and the public wears it on its face.

The technical disputes, weaves, droplets, inches, aerosolization (especially that!), continue, and I leave them undisturbed, for the cloth’s office was never chiefly respiratory. The face was always the problem, Uncle. The face is where they are specific. A crowd can be managed; a face insists on being someone. And the mouth carries half their grammar: the smile, the frown, the half-laugh, the tremble before tears, embarrassment, tenderness. Cover it and you do not merely filter the breath. You abridge the person. To cover the face is to efface the self, and we have arranged for the effacement to be self-administered, daily, with elastic.

The yields are everywhere. An old man at the pharmacy asks the clerk to repeat herself, twice, then pretends he has heard and returns home without his task fulfilled; he had been reading lips for years without knowing it, and goes home having purchased silence, which he calls not making a fuss. A widow at a rationed funeral receives condolences from a row of anxious foreheads. You can still smile with your eyes, they keep telling one another. Eyes do something, Uncle. From a stranger at six feet, it reads mostly as watching. I’m told a man’s untoward imagination is heightened because he cannot verify attractiveness in the face, so his gaze wanders elsewhere and his shame aggregates hourly for the lust-adjacent moment we have manufactured. After all, even the leper has a size 1 waist.

And the sorting, instantaneous, universal, unpaid. Covered: safe, obedient, kind. Bare: reckless, selfish, suspect. No warrant, no public tribunal; a man’s character is now adjudicated at the threshold, by glance, in under a second. We have never fielded a faster court decision. Fear, meanwhile, has entered the inventory of the pocket: wallet, keys, phone... mask, four mnemonic beats, performed without thought. The first three items are designed for a free world. The fourth is against it. The hand now remembers fear on the way out of the house.

Enforcement costs us nothing. A woman in a bakery lowered her mask to make herself understood to the man I mentioned above, and was corrected by a stranger in the queue before any official could have been summoned. The stranger held no office and required none; the office has been decentralized with innate instructions. Whole populations now serve as unpaid minor officials, and they enforce this mechanism with an energy no salary could buy, because they are paid in standing, its a wonder anyone sleeps at night with virtue signals beaming brightly from every pair of eyes peaking above the dutiful masked compliant population. A further yield I had not projected: the anxious wear it with relief. For some of them the face was always an exposure, being seen the heaviest tax of their social day. We have issued them a sanctioned veil and named the hiding responsibility. They are not merely compliant, Uncle. They are grateful.

And I have found a household, a particular couple, and I mean to measure the season by their actions; I am keeping their file on my own desk. A husband and a wife, comfortable, a good house on a quiet street, one child, two cars. I have entered them in the registry as the Volunteers, because that is the whole of their art: no one ever has to ask them. The new constabulary are paid in standing, as I reported, and standing is a wage; withhold it, and they resign. These two enforce our mandates unbidden, at their own expense, and thank us for the opportunity.

Mark what we were given to work with, Uncle, because it was nothing but virtue. He is a protector by birth, he stands between his family and the world and is proud to stand there. She is conscientious to the point of restlessness; she cannot let a rule lie unobserved or a targeted task go undone. In a duller decade the two of them would have died quietly, somewhat admired but mostly unremarkable. The era found me the seam in each to make them powerful, if only for this season. His penchant to protect I turned a few degrees outward, until it became a browbeating patrol. Her conscience I turned the same few degrees, until it became a busybody’s sanctioned watch. By June, he was stopping strangers on the footpath to account for their nearness; it is the cloth that licenses the stopping, Uncle; a bare face at forty yards has become a thing one citizen may take up with another, like smoke seen over a neighbor’s fence. By September she had learned the number one rings to report a gathering, and had rung it, over a christening, the returned home and slept the sleep of the just. They have not felt themselves change. They tell each other, nightly, across the kitchen table, that they have simply begun, at last, to care.

For the archive, I commend the doorway of the restaurant, where the liturgy is at its most refined. The patron masks to cross the threshold, walks ten feet behind a hostess, sits, and unmasks for ninety minutes of talk and chewing among strangers. Should he rise, the cloth quickly returns for the twelve yards to the lavatory and the twelve yards back. The virus, in this cosmology, is a creature of exquisite manners: ferocious in vestibules and corridors, harmless wherever food is served; it hunts the standing and respects the seated. No one believes this. That is the achievement. They perform it anyway, for the hostess, for the room, for their own membership, and every performance teaches the muscle that notices absurdity to keep its findings to itself. A man who will costume himself for the walk to the lavatory has accepted the essential terms: his perception is negotiable; his standing is not. The fogged spectacles alone repay this effort. I keep a small file of these moments just to laugh.

You will ask for outcome figures. Of course, I decline to keep any. A tool is judged worthy by outcomes; a ritual is deemed worthy by meaning alone; and I have moved the visage article from the first category to the second. The formula of consecration is two words: for others. I did not coin it; I only priced it. It converts fear into generosity at scale. The frightened man is no longer hiding, he is giving. Conformity is rebranded compassion; suspicion, prudence; and fear’s old appetite for company becomes a work of mercy. We have made the mask mean love, Uncle, and a man who will quarrel all day with a regulation will, frankly, avoid a quarrel with love.

Now the anxieties, filed per protocol. The cloth sits unevenly. The clerk wears it ten hours; the man she serves, ten minutes. The young talking boy I mentioned looks up at his teacher and finds only eyes above fabric, and has begun reading foreheads for temperment. The old, as noted, are missing more than sound. And in my surveillance of parents I record the first appearances of a word that concerns me. Not uncomfortable. Not inconvenient. Indignity. A tired mother, watching her son mask for the third recess of the day, has stopped asking whether it is comfortable and begun asking whether it is small sacrifice or not. Discomfort, Uncle, is a sensation, and sensations fatigue. Indignity is a claim, and claims can and do organize.

My question for doctrine: how do I keep a billion small losses filed under inconvenience?

Your devoted nephew,

Dr. F.

Undersecretary for Respiratory Affairs

P.S. They have begun manufacturing the article in patterns, florals, team colors, seasonal prints. I confess the holly print disquieted even me. An emergency with a product line is an emergency that has decided to stay.

Letter VII - Screwtape to Dr. F.

My Dear Dr. F.,

Your report gave me an entire afternoon of satisfaction. However, I warn both of us: distrust that sensation. Satisfaction is the posture in which our kind is most often found asleep at the rail. You have built something genuinely fine, and you have understood, by my count, rather less than half of it.

First: you were right to leave the technical quarrels running, and you must never let them settle. Every hour the humans spend disputing weaves and droplets is an hour spent agreeing on the premise underneath both positions, that the question is material. It is not. If the cloth stopped everything, or nothing, our position would be identical, provided the article continues to mean what you have made it mean. The deeper work was never filtration. It is formation.

Second, your question, how to keep the losses filed under inconvenience, has most of its answer already in your inventory; you have only to see what you are holding. The one fatal misstep would be to let the article be experienced as oppression. Oppression is a known stimulant. It has summoned more courage out of that species than we have ever managed to put back, and martyrs have been cut from cheaper cloth than this. No. The mask must remain what you have made it: a token of care. Which means the language must stay tender, all the way down. A small burden, reluctantly asked. For the vulnerable. Children are resilient. You can still smile with your eyes. Keep the entire vocabulary in the nursery register, and file every spiritual loss, recognition, expression, the freedom of one face toward another, under inconvenience. The filing is the whole mechanism, nephew: it makes the loss unspeakable by making it minor. A man may rise against an indignity; no man rises against an inconvenience without becoming, publicly, the smallest person in the room. Your tired mother is not dangerous so long as she cannot say the word indignity aloud without hearing how it sounds next to it’s just a piece of cloth. And the citizens she might have recruited will go on enforcing tenderly, for cruelty is most durable when it is experienced by the cruel as compassion.

Your Volunteers, next. Please nephew, strike the label before it sets. It flatters you, not them, and a flattered tempter mislabels his own assets. These two are not your discovery, nephew; they are the oldest stock in the house. Every plague century mints the identical pair, and I keep a drawer of them going back to the lazarettos: the Matron, who holds the street under observation from behind her curtain and keeps the record of who called on whom, and the Marshal, who plants himself at the gate and rules on who may pass. The faces are reissued each century; the office is eternal. In Milan they carried the health board’s staff and hunted the untori I told you of. Yours carry an application on a telephone and an inexhaustible supply of conviction.

Here is the instruction that will keep your pride from spoiling them. They are not being made cruel, cruelty is the amateur’s aim, and it spoils, for a cruel man may weary of himself or be shamed out of it. They are being made righteous, which keeps. The righteous cannot be shamed; to them shame is merely the wicked resisting the good. Your Marshal takes no pleasure in stopping the stranger, he believes he is saving him, and the man’s resentment only proves the peril. Your Matron did not relish her call; she wept over it, and the weeping is the bolt thrown home. A woman who has suffered to inform on her neighbor will defend to her grave the necessity that made her suffer, for if it was not necessary, what is she? Keep them in that grief, nephew. It is the most commodious cell we have ever furnished, and the door locks only from the inside.

Now the face, since you have at last begun to see it. The Enemy committed an extravagance there which we have never forgiven. No two faces issued alike, and then the claim that He knows each one by heart. The face is where the species defeats our redux. A man can hate a class for thirty years without missing a meal; show him a single face from inside that class, at the wrong moment, in the wrong light, and the whole account comes under audit. Shame keeps its office in the face. So does courage. Mercy is transacted there almost exclusively, the face is where one soul discovers that another is looking back. Your bureaucrats survive by never being looked back at; an order covering a million children is permitted only because no single obeying child conveys their confusion and marked sadness, except through the mask . So mark what your cloth has actually done. It has not blinded anyone. It has made the street a procession of categories, covered, bare; safe, suspect, where there was a procession of persons. A category cannot be absorbed at sight. That is not a side effect. That is the work. And it extends our oldest inversion to point-blank range: a man may now stand a yard from his neighbor and still withhold his face. Absence, worn. See that it goes on meaning devotion.

Your next assignment is saturation. Move the article from emergency to scenery. I want it in the advertisements, on the photographs, where it filters nothing, which is precisely its value there, for meaning is the only work an image can do. On the mannequins. On the school posters with their round, smiling letters. On the clergy at their livestreams; on celebrities at their ceremonies; in the children’s cartoons; in the airline videos with their serene, half-erased crews. Patterns, team colors, your holly print. The goal is not that the mask be required. Requirements can be repealed. The goal is that its absence come to feel indecent, the bare face in public reading as a kind of undress. Law compels the body, nephew. Indecency instructs the soul.

As for the contradictions your restaurant liturgy displays so handsomely: stop apologizing for them in your filings. You still account absurdity a cost. Properly managed, absurdity is not a weakness in the regime; it is one of its tests. Any rule that makes sense can be obeyed in mere agreement. The doorway ritual asks for something better: that a man override the report of his own eyes in favor of the meaning assigned by authority, and then, this is the kernel, that he not say what he noticed. Each performance is a small referendum on which shall be master, his perception or his standing, and we want the question rehearsed daily until it no longer feels like a question.

Which brings me to the man you did not mention, and he is the one I think about: the quiet one who has noticed. Not the shouters, the shouters manage themselves, and a fine or two will keep them shrill and unpersuasive. I mean the decent man at the table, doing silent arithmetic about the corridor and the chair. Your entire task with him is the administration of his loneliness. He must never learn how many of him there are. Keep him unsure whether his observations are intelligent or merely unkind; that is the hinge, for a decent man will suppress a true thought indefinitely if he suspects the thought is cruel. Give him nothing so vivifying as persecution. Certainly, make your preparations for censorship, that will come soon enough. But be cautious. He will eventually give pause at the office in a candid moment of truth. He will indeed notice the dinner invitation that stops coming. Fines make martyrs. Pauses make members.

The children require their own paragraph, and here your reporting tends sentimental in the wrong direction: you cite their adaptability as a success. Of course they adapt. Children adapt to anything; that was never in question and was never the prize. Adaptation is not evidence that nothing was bent. Adaptation is the bending. The sapling tied to the stake does not complain either. I read mention another report of a boy who chose the dinosaur print and felt lucky, let him feel lucky; his mother, watching him feel lucky, is the one who goes quiet, and her you will file under inconvenience as instructed. What the boy is learning underneath the print is the catechism we could never have taught openly: that the other person is, first, a risk. Approach is the exception; distance, the rule; the stranger, a hazard until cleared. A child who learns strangers as hazards before he learns them as faces will furnish us with business for decades. On the harm itself: publish nothing, claim nothing, and forbid the eager among your staff to gloat in trade journals. Let it arrive late and diffuse, an anecdote here, a specialist’s worried report there, a grief with no date on it. Harm that arrives all at once produces inquiries. Harm that arrives gradually produces essays.

And now lift your eyes from the cloth, because the cloth was never the objective. Today it is fabric over the mouth. Tomorrow it will be a credential in the pocket; after that, some other token, the form will change and the changing itself is useful, since every new token re-runs the training from the beginning. What we are installing is the reflex beneath all tokens: I prove my goodness by displaying public obedience. Say that sentence slowly until you hear everything inside it. A creature that proves its goodness by display has moved its conscience out of doors, relocated it to the audience, and a conscience approval kept by the audience is an approval we can edit. The artifact is not the achievement. The reflex, the reaction, the retribution for disobedience is the achievement.

Two cautions in closing. Do not press humiliation openly. We are not after conquest, which is loud and breeds resistance; we are after participation, which is quiet and breeds itself. The ideal subject is not the man ordered into the mask but the man who feels the stranger approaching on the path and reaches up, unbidden, to draw the cloth over his nose, a small bow performed for no audience but his own conscience, which now reports to us. The safest mask is the one adjusted by the wearer before anyone asks. Once the gesture is self-administered, the enforcement has moved indoors, where no repeal can reach it.

And when the cloth finally comes off, seasons end, nephew; I have outlived thousands, do not mourn the prop. If you have worked properly, the loss will by then be stored where grief cannot take inventory. The man will not miss the open faces of strangers; he will have stopped expecting them. The child will not mourn what the street withheld from him; he never learned its name. Your talking boy will carry the era at the edges of his sentences for sixty years, and no listener will ever learn what she is hearing. She will be hearing the cloth, nephew: a language keeps what a childhood pays. What cannot be imagined cannot be mourned, and what cannot be mourned cannot be reclaimed. So let the masks come off on schedule, with ceremony if they like. Your assignment is the face beneath: see that it emerges trained, guarded at the mouth, careful at the eyes, a face that has learned to behave like a mask.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

Everyone remembers the 2020 argument about an “October surprise” vaccine — the worry that Donald Trump would force an emergency authorization out of the FDA in time to help him win. What we didn’t have, until now, was Fauci’s own contemporaneous account of what he did about it.

His diary has it. Across five months, he tracks the pressure campaign, names the people applying it, and records the moment he picked up the phone and told the FDA official who would have to sign the authorization that he had his back if he refused.

Who’s who in these entries

Peter Marks -Director of the FDA center that reviews vaccines. The authorization would go through him.

Stephen Hahn - FDA Commissioner, Marks’s boss. Fauci repeatedly worries he will “cave.”

Mark Meadows - White House Chief of Staff.

Alex Azar - Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Larry Horowitz - Works closely with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He is Fauci’s source, again and again.

Francis Collins & Cliff Lane - NIH Director and Fauci’s deputy at NIAID. They make the call to Marks with him.

June 20, 2020 “I may need to blow the whistle on her”

It starts earlier than you’d think, and it starts with Deborah Birx — not the White House political staff.

Fauci writes that he is “getting progressively disillusioned” with the White House coronavirus response coordinator. His complaint is that she wants to skip the clinical trials and move straight to emergency authorizations:

Deb has ststed [sic] that we should noit [sic] do clinical trials since “I want to see every infected person in a nursing home get plasma early on and steroids later. Forget the trial, we need to do this on EUAs. She says the same thing about vaccine trials. Clearly, she is trying to provide Trump with his October surprise. I may need to blow the whistle on her.Diary, June 20, 2020 — released package p. 212

Note what this is: five months before the election, Fauci has already framed the acceleration of vaccine approval as an election play, and has already contemplated going public to stop it.

Late July 2020 - The tip-off from the Speaker’s office

By late July, Fauci is recording the same worry about Meadows. On July 26 he watches the chief of staff on television and writes that it is “his way of backing out of a failure and trying to get an ‘October Surprise’… Heads up for him trying to push an early approval of vaccine.”

The next day, July 27, Fauci is in the Oval Office briefing Trump on therapeutics and vaccines. His note is almost sympathetic: Trump “accepted that the vaccine might not be ready before the election, but he was not happy about it.”

Then, on July 31, comes the entry that changes the picture. Fauci’s information does not come from inside the administration he serves. It comes from Nancy Pelosi’s office:

Important call form [sic] Larry Horowitz who works closely with nancy Pelosi. Apparently, There was a meeting in the WH with Steve Mnuchin, Mark Meadows, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schummer. Steve and Mark told Nancy and Chuck that AstraZeneca will have vaccine in September and that it will be given an EUA… Apparently, Peter Marks does not know anything about this and Larry just informed him. Bottom line is that they are going to pressure Steve Han [sic] (who likely will cave in in the idea of an EUA) to issue one even though Peter has serius [sic] issues with this. An EUA will likely get in the way of completing the RCTs that are going on. Clearly. This is politically driven and will be a ploy for Trump to get re-elected.Diary, July 31, 2020 — released package p. 267

Read that middle sentence again. The FDA’s top vaccine regulator did not know the White House was planning to authorize a vaccine in September. He found out because a Pelosi aide told him. The political positioning here on both sides is crazy.

August 7, 2020 - The phone call

A week later, Fauci records what he did with the information. This is the entry the whole story turns on:

Call from Larry Horowitz (works with Nancy Pelosi)… He had warned me a few days ago about Meadows trying to pressure Hahn and Marks to grant UA [sic — EUA] (or even BLA) prematurely to vaccines (likely AZ) in time for the election. I called Peter Marks a couple of days ago (together with Collins and Lane) and explained that we would back him if he holds the line. He called the AZ package “a hot mess” and definitely not in shape for an EUADiary, August 7, 2020 — released package p. 274

Three of the most senior scientists in the federal government — the NIAID director, the NIH director, and Fauci’s own deputy — telephoned the regulator who would sign the authorization and told him they would back him if he held out.

Fauci’s justification is on the page and it is (he claims) a scientific one. Marks called the AstraZeneca submission “a hot mess.” An early authorization, Fauci had written a week earlier, “will likely get in the way of completing the RCTs that are going on.” Whether you find that persuasive is the whole argument. But the intervention itself is no longer in dispute. He wrote it down.

The pattern repeats through August. On the 8th, Horowitz flags that an FDA official needs support against a hydroxychloroquine authorization being pushed by Peter Navarro — and that Hahn told her to hold her decision so he could “speak with Meadows.”

On the 24th, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla calls Fauci, worried AstraZeneca will get an authorization before the other companies finish their trials. On the 26th, after the FDA authorizes convalescent plasma, Fauci writes that Hahn “likely caved to Meadows. Who is looking for good news before the election.”

October 29, 2020 - Five days out

With the election five days away, the fight moves to monoclonal antibody drugs from Lilly and Regeneron. Fauci flags the entry himself, in red ink, in his own journal:

Some potentially nefarious stuff going on. The FDA career scientists are hesitant to grant EUAs to Lilly’s and Regeneron’s mAb based on the current data. Alex Azar is really pushing them and furious because he thinks FDA is “slow-walking” the process so as not to have it out before the election in 5 days. Clearly, Alex wants to please the POTUS so that they can say that they have a breakthrough… right before the election… We encouraged Francis to support the career scientists at FDA since they do not want to rush this through. They need more time to gather important information since what they have now is rather weak. Diary, October 29, 2020 — released package p. 432

Same shape as August: the administration pushes to get something announced before the vote, and Fauci works the other way, encouraging the NIH director to stiffen the FDA’s resistance.

November 21, 2020 - The accusation lands

Trump lost. Pfizer announced its 95% efficacy result on November 9 — six days after Election Day. And a little over two weeks later, the same back-channel that had been feeding Fauci information all summer delivered the other side’s verdict:

Got call from Larry Horowitz tonight telling me that Peter Marks told him that Trump called up Steve Hahn today and told him that Alex Azar said that Steve lost the POTUS the election by holding up the news about the Pfizer vaccine. Trump was cursing Steve on the phone and then hung up. Steve did not know if he was going to get fired and told this to Peter who called up Larry. Still not sure what is going to happen. Diary, November 21, 2020 — released package p. 488

There is one more entry worth noting. On November 9, the day Pfizer’s result was announced, Fauci wrote that he was “surprised that there was not even a hint in Pence’s voice that declaring the vaccine successful a few days AFTER the election was a conspiracy of some sort. I have not even heard any of that from the Oval Office.”

He was waiting for the accusation. It arrived twelve days later, and it was aimed at Stephen Hahn.

What the record does establish, in his own hand: Fauci personally intervened with the FDA’s top vaccine regulator to encourage him to resist a pre-election authorization, and his intelligence on White House vaccine plans ran repeatedly through the office of the Speaker of the House — on July 31, August 7, August 8, and again in November.

THE MERCH WAVE

March 2020

01—09

01 Fauci donuts - Donuts Delite sold thousands; copycats followed nationwide.

02 T-shirts with his face - Commercially produced and sold across the country.

03 Prayer candles - Votive candles cast him as a haloed saint.

04 Socks, mugs, pillows, sweatshirts, magnets, bottle openers - A full secondary merch wave, all unlicensed.

05 ‘Honk for Dr. Fauci’ bumper stickers

06 ‘Color Me Fauci’ coloring book - Crayon-in outlines of his face.

07 Instagram Live with Steph Curry - Obama and Bieber replied with emojis.

08 FaceTime interview with Trevor Noah

09 A song dedicated to him on San Francisco radio - Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Keep on Pushing.’

March 2020

“For better or worse, I am becoming an international celebrity.”

March 2020

“CRAZY, CRAZY – donuts are being named after me; T shirts have my picture on them and are being sold; San Francisco radio is dedicating a song to me – Curtis Mayfield singing “Keep on Pushing”; coloring pictures with crayons for my picture, face time with Trevor Noah; Instagram with Steph Curry”

April 2020

10 Brad Pitt plays him on SNL - Pitt thanked him ‘in a very serious tone’ when the sketch ended.

11 Sammie Award - Outstanding Federal Employee of the Year.

12 Official Fauci bobblehead - Raised $100,000 for healthcare-worker charities.

13 ‘Facepalm’ and ‘red tie’ bobblehead variants - $200,000 across all versions.

14 ‘Fauci Pouchy’ cocktail bags - Cocktails-to-go in transparent pouches bearing his image.

15 Lingua Franca cashmere sweater - A high-end knitwear brand’s Fauci edition.

16 Portrait sells for $15,000 - Jeremy Penn painting; proceeds to charity.

17 Petition: name him Sexiest Man Alive - 10,000+ signatures sent to People.

18 Video games using his name and likeness

19 Organized fan clubs - With membership and their own merchandise.

20 News stories about grandmothers with crushes on him

21 Restaurant dishes named after him

April 2020 · original spelling [sic]

“It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt me since I am so busy….seriously.”

April 2020

“The ‘swag’ around me is getting really ridiculous… Geeeez!! I do not like this one bit.”

April 2020

“Continued crazy stuff: Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; video games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead; dishes in restaurants named after me, and on and on.”

April 2020

“The ridiculous attention to me continues; fan clubs, Swags, am constantly on TV”

Faucoi remarks about the fuss arrive in the first two months… and hen the diary goes quiet about the attention while the ledger keeps growing for another two and a half years.

THE BRAND EXPANDS

May–June 2020

22 Linguine with white clam sauce - A Long Island clam bar named its signature dish after him.

23 - A racehorse named Fauci runs at Belmont Park - Went off as the 4-to-5 betting favorite.

23 THE AWARD SEASON

October–November 2020

24 Time 100 — ranked #1 in Leaders - Top of Time’s Leaders category.

25 - Leonardo da Vinci Award A celebrity tribute reel accompanied the honor.

December 2020

26. People Person of the Year - Alongside Clooney, Gomez, and King.

27 Kate McKinnon begins a recurring SNL impersonation

28 Eleanor Roosevelt Prize - Qmerican Bar Association.

29 Sicilian of the Year Award - I Love Sicilia magazine.

30 Mother Teresa Award 0 Harmony Foundation.

“Extraordinary enthusiastic reception… totally mobbed for selfies.”

During his time as NIAID Director, Dr. Anthony Fauci kept meticulous daily journals. He recorded conversations, decisions, and his thoughts on the actions of politicians, colleagues, and the press — with near-daily entries throughout the COVID pandemic. His diary is now public, released by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs under Chairman Rand Paul.

It runs to hundreds of pages. And what it shows is a gap between two parallel stories: the one Fauci told the American public, and the one he wrote down for himself.

Night One: The Alarm Went Straight to Him

On January 31, 2020, Dr. Jeremy Farrar — director of the Wellcome Trust — got off a routine call with Fauci about the emerging Wuhan outbreak, then immediately patched Fauci back into a second call. On the line: Dr. Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research, and Dr. Eddie Holmes from Sydney. They were not trading internet rumors.

Fauci’s diary records what they were actually discussing — the furin cleavage site of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. This structural feature had no close parallel in known bat coronaviruses. The scientists on the call raised the possibility that it could not have occurred naturally and may have been deliberately inserted. They discussed whether the virus had escaped from a laboratory, and whether the release was accidental or intentional — with accidental release considered the more likely scenario if it was a lab origin at all.

“They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.”— Fauci’s diary, Jan. 31, 2020

This happened before most Americans knew there was an origins debate. Fauci was in the room — not as a passive bystander, but as the person Farrar called for advice. His diary records that he immediately suggested getting a larger group of qualified virologists together and convening the next day. He then called HHS officials, consulted Secretary Azar, and brought in Francis Collins.

The Feb. 1 Call Was Not a Consensus

The next morning, February 1, 2020, Fauci and Francis Collins convened an emergency teleconference. Participants included Collins, Farrar, Patrick Vallance, Andersen, Holmes, Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, Robert Garry, and others.

This call has been described, and its aftermath used to suggest, that the scientific community quickly reviewed the evidence and concluded the virus was not lab-made. Fauci’s own diary says something different.

“There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally… The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses… we could not let this go.”— Fauci’s diary, Feb. 1, 2020

Fouchier and Drosten argued for natural origin. “The rest” — Fauci’s phrase — thought deliberate insertion was possible. Fauci wrote: “We could not let this go.” The room was divided. The Proximal Origin paper, which publicly declared that “no laboratory-based scenario was plausible,” was submitted four days later.

The Public Story Hardened. The Evidence Hadn’t.

On February 6, 2020, the government completed its first formal review of the origins question. According to Rand Paul’s committee summary, it found no clear evidence of malfeasance — but explicitly concluded the issue still needed investigation.

By April 17, 2020, Fauci was publicly telling the country the virus was “totally consistent” with a natural species jump. By May, he was dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as a “circular argument.”

The diary captures a widening gap: an internal review that said keep investigating, and a public-facing Fauci increasingly confident that the question was settled.

When Questions Came Back, the Fight Moved to Messaging

By May 2021, congressional investigators had begun asking about the NIH’s role in funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci’s diary records that HHS public-affairs officials resisted putting out a proactive NIH statement with direct responses to those congressional inquiries.

Fauci’s own private assessment of that silence is striking:

“If the government stayed quiet, it would look like ‘we’re covering things up.’”— Fauci’s diary, May 2021

That is Fauci’s private read of what NIH’s communications strategy looked like from the outside. It is either a warning he was trying to prevent — or a description of exactly what was happening.

He Pushed Back Against the FBI’s Lab-Leak Conclusion

On July 7, 2021, Fauci met with Beth Cameron and Maher Bitar — the NSC’s senior director for intelligence programs — inside the EEOB Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). The FBI, by this point, had assessed that COVID-19 most likely originated in a laboratory.

Fauci’s diary is blunt about his view of that conclusion:

“It became clear that the FBI has no idea what they’re talking about since they are convinced that COVID originated in a laboratory leak.”— Fauci’s diary, July 7, 2021

He then urged NSC officials to work closely with Andersen, Holmes, Garry, and Rambaut — the same circle of scientists at the center of the early origins calls, and the co-authors of Proximal Origin. Fauci was not just privately skeptical of the FBI’s conclusion. He was actively steering intelligence officials toward the same scientific allies who had shaped the public narrative.

The Ally Who Made Him Feel Better

Around May 2021 — the same month Fauci warned that staying quiet would look like a cover-up — he had a private conversation with Kristian Andersen. This is the same Andersen who, in January 2020, had privately written that the lab-escape hypothesis was “so friggin’ likely to have happened.”

A year later, Andersen was privately reassuring Fauci. According to the diary, Andersen was “very emphatic” that the work done at the Wuhan Institute under the NIH grant was not gain-of-function research, and confirmed that chimeric viruses made under that grant were “not even close sequence-wise” to SARS-CoV-2.

“I feel much better now that he is in total support of what I have been saying.”— Fauci’s diary, May 2021

The same scientist. A year apart. First privately alarmed. Then privately reassuring. What changed in between was the publication of Proximal Origin — the paper Andersen co-authored that declared the lab origin implausible.

Scott Atlas: The Dissenter Fauci Couldn’t Dismiss on Science Alone

In August 2020, President Trump brought in Dr. Scott Atlas — a radiologist and health policy fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution — as a White House special assistant. You recall that the team here at Rational Ground was part of the support group of data analysts that Dr. Atlas relied on for his data analysis while he was at the White House. We are proud to play a particular role in this thorn in Fauci’s side

Atlas argued that schools could and should reopen, that children did not drive community spread, and that lockdowns caused more harm than they prevented.

Fauci’s diary entry on Atlas’s arrival frames the dispute in political and credentialing terms, not scientific ones:

“Trump has brought in a Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiation oncologist from Stanford Hoover Institute. He is a FOX News Commentator and Trump has seen him on FOX. He is against everything we are saying… He obviously does not believe in community spread. This is going to be a real problem.”— Fauci’s diary, August 12, 2020

The conflict intensified through the fall. In late October, Fauci gave a Washington Post interview in which he, by his own diary account, “strongly blasted Scott Atlas.” The White House pushed back. Alyssa Farah, a senior White House aide, texted Fauci at 7 AM the next morning:

“I am so sorry that fool Scott Atlas keeps attacking you. I’m even more sorry I’m not in a better position of influence to see him out the door. I’m trying to make people see he’s a disaster.”— Alyssa Farah, quoted in Fauci’s diary

Atlas resigned in December 2020. Fauci’s diary entry on the resignation is telling:

“Scott Atlas resigns! I imagine that is because everything that is happening now with the surges has finally proven him to be incorrect on virtually everything that he has said. The one area where he was correct was in saying that school children are not the drivers of the outbreak.”— Fauci’s diary, December 1, 2020

Atlas was publicly dismissed, mocked in the press, and branded a fringe figure. Fauci’s private diary concedes that Atlas was right about the thing parents cared about most — whether keeping kids out of school made any difference.

MORE TO COME!

For years, Ralph Baric was the quiet center of the COVID-origins story.

He was the coronavirus engineer at the University of North Carolina whose handwritten note on the 2018 DEFUSE proposal warned that American researchers would “likely freak out” over the biosafety of what was planned. He was the “B” in the story we published — the man who actually knew how to build these viruses. And for six years, he mostly didn’t talk.

On April 10, 2026, that changed. Baric sat for a voluntary transcribed interview with the staff of Senator Rand Paul’s Homeland Security Committee. On July 23, Paul released the transcript. Read in his own words, it is the most candid account we have yet from anyone who was actually at the workbench.

Here is what he said.

“That’s a gain-of-function experiment. There’s no other way to think about it.”

Start with the word everyone spent years fighting over: gain-of-function.

DARPA’s PREEMPT program — the solicitation that DEFUSE was written to answer — asked researchers to learn what makes a virus jump between species “down to the nucleotide level.” Investigators asked Baric what that meant. He didn’t hedge:

“That’s a gain-of-function experiment. There’s no other way to think about it… when I read that, that’s exactly what they’re asking for.”

Then they turned to DEFUSE itself — the proposal Baric submitted alongside Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The plan described finding a bat coronavirus, and, if the science warranted, dropping a furin cleavage site into a viral backbone. The furin cleavage site is the exact feature of SARS-CoV-2 that first made serious scientists look sideways at a natural origin — because its closest relatives don’t have one.

Who would have performed that insertion? Baric was asked directly.

“That part would be done by me.”

Let that land. The single most suspicious feature of the pandemic virus was, on paper, a job assigned to a lab in North Carolina — by the lab’s own principal investigator, under oath-grade questioning.

DEFUSE was never funded; DARPA rejected it. No one has shown that SARS-CoV-2 is the DEFUSE construct. But the thing skeptics were mocked for even describing — a plan to engineer a furin site into a bat coronavirus, with a named American scientist to do the cutting — Baric just confirmed in plain English.

The experiment he buried — and what it does to “Proximal Origin”

This is the part that should reset the entire debate.

The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 — the March 2020 paper used to shut the lab-leak question down — rested on a deceptively simple argument. If someone had engineered this virus, the authors reasoned, they would have built it to bind human cells as tightly as possible, the “ideal” configuration. The real virus doesn’t bind in that ideal way. Therefore, they concluded, no one designed it.

Baric ran an experiment, years earlier, that quietly demolishes that logic.

He explained that a biochemist colleague believed the tightest possible grip on the human receptor would be “the most optimal and most dangerous form of virus.” Baric disagreed — and tested it:

“If they react too well, that interaction can’t come apart… the virus, as it tries to release, gets caught up in what’s called a dominant negative effect, and it will prevent virus replication… I tested that hypothesis and showed that I was right, that the super-binding things were just as deleterious as the really poor-binding ones.”

In plain terms: grip too tightly and the virus gets stuck and can’t spread. So a knowledgeable designer would deliberately avoid the “ideal” binding that Proximal Origin assumed an engineer would use. The very feature the paper held up as proof of natural origin is exactly what a competent engineer might choose on purpose.

And then the tell:

“I subsequently told NIH and destroyed those viruses. I have never told anyone, and I would recommend that this committee not release that.”

He reported it to NIH. He destroyed the materials. He’d told no one. The finding that undercuts the field’s central natural-origin argument sat unpublished — and the man who ran it asked Senate investigators to keep it quiet.

The ghost on the February 1 call

Regular readers know the February 1, 2020 teleconference — Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar, and the authors of Proximal Origin, one day after Kristian Andersen privately called a lab origin “so friggin’ likely.”

Baric confirmed he was on that call. But he appears on no invitation list. He couldn’t say who invited him:

“I couldn’t find how I knew about the meeting.”

Two participants have since told the Committee they didn’t even know he was on the line. And Baric gave conflicting accounts of whether he spoke — first saying he stayed silent so as not to “change the direction of the conversation,” then saying “I think so… we went around and introduced everybody,” and that he was “surprised that they didn’t know I was there.”

The world’s foremost coronavirus engineer was on the call that shaped the official origin narrative — and can’t explain how he got there.

The rest of the ledger

Three more admissions, briefly, because they matter:

• The mouse model. Baric served more than a decade as a paid member of the intelligence community’s Biological Science Expert Group. He confirmed sending his U.S. taxpayer-funded humanized-mouse model to Shi at the Wuhan lab. When China later tried to sell that model back to American scientists, he said: “What kind of crap is this? This is not ethical behavior.” He framed the sharing as compelled — “I’m required to share” — and told Congress that if they don’t like it, “you all should write regulations that prevent that.”

• Five years of silence on USAID money. In November 2015, Daszak sent an urgent email asking that USAID PREDICT and NIAID funding be acknowledged on Baric’s paper with Shi. The acknowledgment wasn’t added until 2020 — five years later. That delay sits awkwardly against then-USAID Administrator Samantha Power’s 2022 testimony that the agency had “no evidence” it funded, and had “not authorized,” gain-of-function research.

• NIH lost its own homework. When NIH officials met with Baric in February 2020 and asked for his research records — the ones NIH supposedly reviewed years earlier — Baric says they “didn’t know where the documents were.” And DEFUSE, he testified, never came up in his conversation with Fauci.

Read it honestly

None of this is a confession that Baric built SARS-CoV-2. DEFUSE was never funded. A plan to insert a furin site is not proof that this furin site came from that plan, and Baric plainly believes his own work was responsible and defensible. He is a hostile-but-voluntary witness, questioned by a committee with a thesis.

But strip the spin from both directions and what remains is remarkable enough. The engineer who would have done the furin-site work says the program was gain-of-function, “no other way to think about it.” He ran and buried an experiment that turns the marquee argument of Proximal Origin inside out. He was on the secret call and can’t say why. And the federal agencies that were supposed to be watching couldn’t find their own records.

For years, saying any of this out loud got you called a conspiracy theorist. The furin-site designer just said it himself — into a court reporter’s transcript.

(Senator Paul separately released private Slack messages from the Proximal Origin authors the same week; their contents reinforce the same gap between what these scientists said in public and in private. We’ll have more on those.)

About the source. Quotations are drawn from the official transcript of the April 10, 2026 voluntary transcribed interview of Dr. Ralph Baric before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, released July 23, 2026 by Chairman Rand Paul, and from the Committee’s summary of key findings. The interview and companion Slack release were first publicized by Senator Paul.

In early February 2021, Peter Daszak was on his way home.

You might recall our article from the other day with the video talking about Daszak.

The president of EcoHealth Alliance had just spent weeks in China as part of the World Health Organization’s team investigating the origins of COVID-19 — the mission that took him, however briefly, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab his own organization had helped fund with U.S. taxpayer money. His flight was booked: Qatar Airways 701, Doha to New York’s JFK, landing February 5 at 2:25 p.m.

Waiting for him, on paper, was U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

According to documents released this month by Senator Rand Paul — chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — and first reported by Bill Melugin, officers at CBP’s National Targeting Center had built a formal targeting event around Daszak’s arrival and prepared a Tactical Terrorism Response Team examination. They had a plan, and they had questions.

Then, days before he landed, the plan died. Not because anyone at CBP changed their mind — because another agency intervened.

Why they wanted him

CBP’s interest in Daszak wasn’t a hunch. The internal referral, dated January 11, 2021, called him “an extremely high person of interest” and recommended “a thorough inspection either outbound/inbound.” Officers noted a specific worry: that Daszak “could hand carry and/or mail samples back from China.”

The targeting package laid out why. It cited Daszak’s role as principal investigator on NIH grants tied to bat-coronavirus research — including grant R01AI110964, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” — and his 15-year collaboration with Zhengli Shi, the Wuhan virologist known as “Bat Woman.” It flagged his co-authorship, with Shi and UNC’s Ralph Baric, of the 2013 paper reporting a bat SARS-like virus that could infect human cells, and the 2015 Nature piece on “engineered bat virus” research. And in the officers’ own blunt phrasing:

“Much of the funding DASZAK receives is put towards gain of function research.”

The package even noted that NIH had asked Daszak to retrieve the original virus type-specimen used by the Wuhan lab and return it to the United States — a request Daszak reportedly called “outrageous” and did not appear to intend to honor.

What they planned to ask

This is the part that reads like a checklist someone actually wanted answered. CBP’s recommended questions for the exam included:

• Why was Daszak chosen for the WHO investigative team?

• Where in China did he go, and where did he stay?

• Did the team visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology? What areas did they inspect, and whom did they meet?

• Did the team visit the Chinese CDC?

• Did Daszak collect any biological samples during the trip? Is he traveling with any? Did he mail any samples back to the U.S.? Did he take any materials with him to China?

• Has Daszak maintained contact with anyone at the WIV — and what do they discuss?

The exam was also slated to “include review of media” — that is, a search of his phones and devices, with the search level to be set at the port of entry.

In other words: this was not a wave-through. Customs had assembled the framework to question a returning WHO investigator about whether he was physically carrying biological material across the U.S. border, and to look at what was on his phone.

The intervention

It never happened. And the documents are unusually clear about why.

On February 2, a National Targeting Center message rescinded the inspection request, noting the “subject may be of interest to the FBI” and instructing colleagues to “please disregard request for inspection.” Then, on February 4 — the day before Daszak’s flight — a CBP Deputy Chief Officer serving as the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison sent the line that anchors the whole release:

“Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject below.”

The final disposition record puts it even more plainly:

“FBI requested not to stop subject. No further NTC action.”

Daszak landed at JFK. As far as these records show, no one from CBP questioned him, and no one searched his devices or his luggage.

Read it honestly

Here is what the documents establish, and here is what they don’t — because the gap matters.

They establish that career Customs officers, on their own initiative, identified Daszak as a high-priority subject, built a counterterrorism-style inspection around his return, wanted to ask whether he was moving biological samples, and were called off by the FBI’s New York field office at the last minute.

They do not establish why the FBI made that call. And there’s an innocent reading worth stating out loud: when a Joint Terrorism Task Force asks CBP to “not stop” someone, it is sometimes precisely because the Bureau has its own active interest in that person and doesn’t want a border stop to tip them off or interfere. A stand-down order is not automatically a cover-up; it can be the opposite. But the track record during the Biden years is not great for calming our suspicions.

The redactions hide the names, the office details, and the FBI’s stated reasoning — so the single most important question here, why, is exactly the thing blacked out.

What’s not in dispute is the shape of it: in February 2021, one arm of the federal government wanted to search Peter Daszak at the border, and another arm told it to stand down. For a figure already at the center of the COVID-origins conflict-of-interest story — the man who funneled NIH money to Wuhan, secretly organized the Lancet letter branding lab-leak a “conspiracy theory,” and then sat on the WHO team sent to investigate the very lab he funded — that is a document set worth having in the public record.

The files are public now. The one line still hidden is the one that would explain everything.

About the source. Drawn from a package of internal CBP records released in July 2026 by Senator Rand Paul, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and reported by Bill Melugin. The records are marked Law Enforcement Sensitive / For Official Use Only and were released in redacted form; blacked-out specifics — including names and the FBI’s stated rationale — are left blank here. Quotations are taken from the released text.

Start with one number.

In a single 45-gigabyte file, dated 2016, sat 204,822,241 American voter records — names, ages, phone numbers, addresses. It was one line item in a catalog of “likely leaked, compromised” data that an entity of the People’s Republic of China was holding onto.

That file is one of two dozen documents the White House declassified and released, in redacted form, in July 2026. The set carries a blunt government title: “China’s Acquisition and Exploitation of American Voter Data.” We went through all of it — and then we went through the files themselves, the metadata, because with a release like this that turns out to matter too.

Here’s the honest version, in plain English.

The inventory: what’s actually in the files

The centerpiece is a 2019 catalog. A PRC entity was sitting on a list of leaked and compromised datasets. Most entries were targets in other countries — but 97 were flagged as explicitly American, the bulk of them raw personal information. Several of those datasets were described, in so many words, as U.S. voter-registration records.

The voter data isn’t vague. The catalog itemizes eight named state voter databases. One held 7,893,248 records — with citizenship information attached. Another, roughly 5.5 million. A third listed voter IDs, previous addresses, birth dates, gender, and phone numbers. Sitting beside them: a 28-million-record medical database that included Social Security numbers.

A separate memo describes PRC analysis of voter registration pulled from 18 states, drawn from midterm-election records. The North Carolina file alone covered more than 8 million voters. The Kansas file went further — it carried military affiliation, historical voting records, and voters’ occupation and education, which the document itself calls “a priority.”

The fields they kept read like a wish list: full name and suffix, date of birth, home and mailing address, phone number, party affiliation, where you vote, and how you’ve voted before.

The chronology: the timeline is the story

Lay the documents end to end and you get an arc, not a snapshot:

• By 2016, that 204-million-record voter file already exists.

• In 2018, PRC analysts are working 18 states’ worth of midterm voter data, with a stated plan to run “U.S. Person Matching and Public Opinion Analysis.”

• By 2019, it’s all sitting in a catalog of compromised American data.

• In 2020, U.S. intelligence takes formal note: China is collecting information on American candidates, campaigns, donors, and voter data.

• By 2023, a PRC entity has purchased 2020 voter data outright and is sharing city-level voter records for seven states — Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina.

• Heading into 2024, the discussion turns to the next election: sharing more voter data, requesting “a list of swing states,” and wanting to observe the voting “ahead of time.”

Collected, catalogued, analyzed, bought, sold — and pointed at the next cycle.

The purpose: what it was for, and what it wasn’t

The files don’t leave you guessing. In their own language, the goals were person-matching (tie the records back to real people), public-opinion analysis on U.S. elections, and identifying “the identities of important U.S. targets.” A 2020 assessment adds the influence layer — pushing divisive themes on race, COVID, immigration, and guns across TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Now say what this isn’t. This is mass data collection and influence — not vote-flipping. Nothing in these files claims a single ballot was changed or a result altered. Anyone who tells you the documents prove otherwise hasn’t read them. The real finding is unsettling enough on its own: a foreign government built a detailed, queryable picture of the American electorate, person by person — and kept adding to it.

The Briefing: the whole release on one page

Scale, timeline, the data taxonomy, the named states, and our metadata audit — the full breakdown on a single page. Open the interactive version →

The forensics: we read the documents, not just the headlines

This is the part Rational Ground exists to do. Before trusting a word of the text, we looked at the files as files.

A few things jump out. The release came in two waves days apart — declassified by President Trump on July 3, and by Counsel to the President on July 10 — with the PDFs assembled over a handful of days in mid-July. Most of them were printed and re-scanned on an ordinary office multifunction printer, which flattens every page to a picture. That’s the fingerprint of a manual, last-mile declassification job.

We also checked whether the redactions actually hold — because that’s usually where a release like this springs a leak. They hold. On the two files that kept a live text layer, the text under every black bar is deleted, not merely covered; nothing sensitive is recoverable. Whoever did the redacting did it right.

One document breaks the pattern: an FBI “Albany” report generated a full year earlier and titled, right in its file properties, “…Provided to Chairman Grassley.” And the housekeeping leaked what the censors didn’t — filenames like “NSA.MassagedPDB” and a preserved email subject line, “NIC alternative analysis on china/election,” survived the scrub. The metadata is the one part of a document nobody thinks to censor.

The fine print: read it honestly

Two cautions, because they matter. These are intelligence assessments — analytic judgments, now declassified and redacted — not courtroom findings. And the intelligence community did not speak with one voice: the 2020 assessment carried an internal dissent over how far China actually intended to go. The redactions also strip the specifics — which entities, which agencies, exact sourcing — so read the blanks as unknowns, not as blanks to fill in with your priors.

None of that softens the core of it. A foreign adversary spent years acquiring the voter file of the United States — by the hundred million — and, heading into 2024, was still shopping for more.

About the source. Drawn from “China’s Acquisition and Exploitation of American Voter Data,” a set of 24 U.S. documents declassified and released in redacted form, July 2026. Every figure here is quoted from the released text; blacked-out specifics are left blank. Representative files: 200M Voter Records Compromised · 18 States Memo · PRC US Voter Data — 7 States (2023) · PRC Target 2024 Election (2023) · NIC — Foreign Threats to 2020 US Elections · Summary (Parts 1–3).

In the first weeks of 2020, before most Americans had heard the word “coronavirus,” a small group of scientists was already wrestling with a question that would define the next several years: did this virus come from nature, or from a lab?

The remarkable thing — established now not by speculation but by their own emails, Slack messages, grant documents, and a recently declassified intelligence assessment — is that several of the people who shaped the official answer privately believed something very different from what they told the world.

You can follow the whole story through four names. Conveniently, they run A, B, C, D.

Read more

This week DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified roughly sixty-seven documents, and they supply the part of the story that was always asserted but never quite shown on paper: the mechanism.

Gabbard’s office calls it a “circular reporting loop.” Strip away the jargon and it works like this. Fauci hands the intelligence community a list of scientists to consult. The IC consults them. Their conclusions become the official intelligence assessment.

That assessment then gets cited in public as the independent judgment of the spy agencies. The scientists vouch for Fauci, the spies vouch for the scientists, and the public is told the whole circle is consensus.

I read the documents. The loop is real, and for the first time you can watch it turn.

The Briefing That Shouldn’t Exist

Start with the single most important document in the release, because it does something the others only imply.

On June 4, 2021, the CIA’s Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center sat Anthony Fauci down for a secure video briefing on the origins of COVID-19. The session ran about forty minutes. It was facilitated by Beth Cameron, the National Security Council’s senior director for global health security. We know all of this because the CIA wrote a contemporaneous readout of the meeting, and that readout is now declassified.

What did Fauci do in that briefing? He steered. According to the CIA’s own account, he pointed the analysts toward a Tulane paper on viral lineages that he considered “a clear indication of natural origins.” He reminded them it took twelve years to link the original SARS to bats, so they should be patient about a natural reservoir. And he recommended that the IC reach out to a specific group of US scientists, three of whom, in the readout’s words, “have advocated for features of the virus that they judge to be consistent with a natural origin.”

Read that again. The nation’s top infectious-disease official was brought into a classified intelligence briefing on whether his own funded research might have caused the pandemic, and his contribution was to tell the analysts which outside scientists they should call. Scientists who already agreed with him.

Now set that next to what Fauci told Congress in 2024. Under oath before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, he was asked repeatedly whether he had spoken to “the FBI, CIA, DIA or any U.S. intelligence agency concerning viral research.” He dodged, and then he said: “not to my knowledge about COVID.”

The CIA’s own paperwork says otherwise. There is a readout, with a date, with a list of what he recommended. A separate CIA memo from October 2023 is careful to note there is “no record of Dr. Fauci coming to CIA headquarters,” which rebuts one specific version of the story. It does not rebut the briefing. The briefing happened. It is written down.

The Loop, In Their Own Emails

The June briefing was not a one-off. The declassified emails show the IC treating Fauci as the man who decides which experts are credible.

In July 2021, as the intelligence community raced to finish President Biden’s 90-day origins review, ODNI staff debated whether to act on Fauci’s recommendation of which scientists to consult. One official argued for it in language that should stop you cold: Fauci is “not a policymaker,” he wrote, “he’s a SME” — subject matter expert — “with a wealth of knowledge about current and historical research who probably knows better than most who the real Coronavirus experts are.” Another official pushed back, framing the exact problem: should the IC really take “a policymaker’s recommendations on who we should consult”?

By September 2021, the loop had closed on a specific name. In one email chain, an analyst notes that a particular outside expert “was one of the people that Fauci recommended the DNI reach out to and is on the author line of multiple academic papers sourced in the origins study.” The scientist Fauci recommended wrote papers that the intelligence assessment then cited as sourcing. That is the circle, drawn in a single sentence.

It went further still. In another July 2021 thread, ODNI staff openly weighed recruiting Fauci to peer-review the classified origins paper itself. They knew it was a problem. One wrote that Fauci is “a potential customer of the paper” and “will be seen by many as having a conflict of interest.” They were debating whether to let the most interested party in the country grade the intelligence community’s homework on his own potential culpability.

This is what “circular reporting” means in plain English. It is not a slogan. It is a documented practice, and the people doing it flagged the conflict in real time and considered proceeding anyway.

The Paper Trail on “Lied to Congress”

Gabbard’s release makes a second, harder charge: that Fauci lied under oath. Here the documents give you something concrete, and they also give you the honest limits of the claim.

On August 11, 2021, the Acting Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Tamara Johnson, sent a memo to then-DNI Avril Haines. It informed her that a whistleblower had filed a complaint alleging Fauci “provided false testimony to Congress related to the conduct of gain of function research at the National Institutes of Health, thereby misleading the American people and Congressional oversight.” Eight days later, ODNI General Counsel Christopher Fonzone wrote his own memo identifying exactly which statements were at issue: Fauci’s testimony on May 11, 2021 that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute,” and his July 20 refusal to retract it when Rand Paul gave him the chance.

So the “lied to Congress” allegation is not invented for a press release. It was filed, in writing, by a whistleblower, escalated to the DNI, and traced to specific sworn statements, all back in 2021.

Here is where Rational Ground will be straight with you, because our credibility is the only thing we have. The IC Inspector General declined to escalate the complaint, reasoning that Fauci was not an intelligence official and the gain-of-function dispute was already public. And whether the statement was a “lie” still turns on the contested definition of gain-of-function research, the same definitional fight that has dragged on for five years.

This is a serious, documented allegation with a paper trail. It is not yet an adjudicated finding of perjury. Both of those things are true, and you are adult enough to hold them at once. it may not matter in the end because time may have run out.

The American people were told a story, and they were told the smartest, most independent people in government had checked it. These documents show the man who shaped the story also picked the people who checked it. That is not science. That is a closed circuit. And the only reason you can finally see the wiring is that someone, at last, declassified it.

This article is based on the documents released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on June 18, 2026. Quotations are drawn from those documents. Readers can review the full release and judge the evidence for themselves.

Supporting testimony: CIA whistleblower James Erdman, sworn testimony before the Committee, May 13, 2026

For five years we’ve been told the story in one direction. The virus was natural. The lab-leak idea was a conspiracy theory. The scientists settled it, the journals confirmed it, and anyone who asked questions was a crank.

Rand Paul just released the documents that run the story the other direction. Something we’ve always known here.

What they show is not a scientist caught off guard by a once-in-a-century pandemic. They show a man who had been wired into America’s intelligence and defense apparatus for nearly twenty years before COVID, who understood from day one exactly how serious an engineered virus would be, and who then spent 2021 reading classified intelligence on the origins question inside a White House vault while publicly pushing the natural-origin line to the very same officials he was briefing alongside.

Let me walk you through it, because the dates matter.

Part One: They Had Fauci On Call Twenty Years Before COVID

The convenient version of Anthony Fauci is the apolitical doctor, the bench scientist who rose to run an infectious-disease institute and answered the phone when the pandemic hit. The documents tell a different story about how deep his ties to the national security world ran, and how far back.

In July 2003, the National Intelligence Council — the body that produces the government’s most senior analytic assessments — emailed Fauci a draft paper titled “SARS: Implications for the US.” The request was explicit: “We would greatly value your feedback in reviewing the text. Please let us know if we can cite you by name and title as a reviewer in the opening page.” By that August, his feedback had been incorporated and the paper was published. The NIC officer thanked him for lending work “of your stature,” noted the paper was going up on the agency’s public site, and added that they were giving “a simple head’s up to a handful of journalists who work on health issues” about it.

Read that again. Twenty years before COVID, the intelligence community wasn’t just consulting Fauci. It was citing him by name to lend its analysis credibility, and coordinating the press rollout with him. The relationship between the spy agencies and the public face of American infectious-disease science was already a two-way street.

Then, in November 2003, Fauci received a CIA report from the Directorate of Intelligence titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future.” It is worth quoting, because it tells you what Fauci knew was possible long before 2020. A panel of life-science experts had concluded that advances in biotechnology could “create a much more dangerous biological warfare (BW) threat.” Among the warnings: “The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man.” The report described “designer” agents built to evade the immune system, and even a “stealth” virus that “could lie dormant inside the victim for an extended period before being triggered.”

The CIA handed Fauci a roadmap of how a bioengineered pathogen could be built and hidden. In 2003.

The pattern continued. In September 2007, Ambassador William Courtney wrote to invite Fauci to meet with an outside review panel examining the future of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s work countering weapons of mass destruction, co-chaired by Robert Joseph and future Defense Secretary Ash Carter. The note was casual — “I enjoyed chatting at the NSC reception” — and the discussions, it said, would “take place up to the SECRET level.” By March 2020, Fauci was being invited to address JASON, the secretive independent group that advises the government on the most sensitive scientific questions.

None of this is illegal. Plenty of it is even sensible. But it demolishes the myth that Fauci was a disinterested clinician with no stake in the national-security framing of a pandemic. He had been embedded in that world, by name, for two decades. When COVID arrived, he was not a bystander. He was the man the agencies already called.

Part Two: The Week the Debate Was Steered

Now to the part that should make your jaw tighten.

On January 31, 2020, Fauci was already taking the engineering question seriously. In an email chain that day with Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust and virologist Kristian Andersen, Fauci wrote that Andersen had relayed “his concern about the furin cleavage site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019-nCoV.” His instruction was unambiguous about the stakes: if a group of evolutionary biologists examined the data and the concern held up, “they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5.”

Sit with that. The very first instinct of the nation’s top infectious-disease official, on January 31, 2020, was that if the virus looked engineered, this was a matter for the FBI and MI5. He understood exactly how serious it was. From day one.

So what happened next?

According to the committee’s timeline, on February 1 Fauci joined a call with a group of scientists convened to discuss the concern that the virus looked engineered — and several of those participants then began drafting what would become the Proximal Origin paper. On February 3, Fauci participated in a National Academies call to “determine the origins of 2019-nCoV,” a call that included Andersen, EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, gain-of-function researcher Ralph Baric, and federal officials from the intelligence community and other agencies.

Six weeks after privately warning that an engineered virus would be an FBI-and-MI5 matter, that same circle of scientists published the paper that slammed the door on the question.

On March 6, 2020, Andersen emailed Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins to tell them Nature Medicine would publish the paper, thanking them “for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 ‘origins’ question.” Collins forwarded it inside NIH with a line that, once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee:

“FYI, this is work that Tony, Jeremy, Larry, and I helped with but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper. The net conclusion: ‘The analysis of public genome sequence data... no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered.’ I hope Senator Cotton notices this.”

Helped with. Not mentioned. “I hope Senator Cotton notices this.”

This is the NIH Director, in writing, describing a paper that the public was told represented the independent conclusion of working virologists — and acknowledging that he and Fauci helped shape it, would not be credited, and saw it as a tool to rebut a sitting senator who had raised the lab question.

On March 17, 2020, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published, declaring that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” That sentence became the wall. Every journalist, every fact-checker, every platform moderator pointed at it for the next two years. Behind it stood two of the most powerful officials in American medicine, who had helped build it and arranged not to sign it.

Part Three: Reading the Real Intel While Selling the Cover Story

Here is where the documents move from troubling to damning.

In May 2021, President Biden ordered the intelligence community to conduct a 90-day review of COVID’s origins. Over the following weeks, the government brought Fauci inside the classified tent. On June 4, the National Security Council convened a classified briefing for him. On June 9, HHS worked to get him into a Deputies Committee meeting so sensitive it required one-time read-ins “through two IC agencies” for roughly nine separate compartments.

On June 21, the NSC told Fauci a “read file” had been prepared for him “in line with what has been provided to other senior Administration officials and the President” — material so restricted it could not leave “the complex.” This is the SCIF, the secure room where the government’s most closely held secrets are read and left behind.

Then the timeline delivers its hammer. On July 8, 2021 — one day after a classified reading-room session — Fauci forwarded the National Security Council a new preprint. It was written by the same Proximal Origin authors: Andersen, Bob Garry, Eddie Holmes, Jeremy Farrar, Andrew Rambaut. The emails confirm it. Beth Cameron of the NSC thanked him for “coming down and spending time with us,” and Fauci replied that the preprint “summarizes what I said yesterday,” asking that it be shown to the team.

One day after reading the classified intelligence on what actually happened, Fauci handed the National Security Council the natural-origin talking points authored by the same scientists whose paper he had helped shape eighteen months earlier — and told them it captured what he’d said inside the vault.

He was getting the real briefing in private and pushing the public story in the same breath, to the same people.

And the documents keep going. On August 13, 2021, a Defense Department whistleblower filed an inspector-general complaint over EcoHealth Alliance’s 2018 DARPA proposal — the now-infamous “DEFUSE” plan — to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Baric, among others, to insert a furin cleavage site into a chimeric coronavirus. A furin cleavage site. The exact feature Fauci had flagged to the FBI-and-MI5 in January 2020. Twelve days later, on August 25, the NSC invited Fauci to review a “very interesting report” on “the same topic as before.” He called it “important” and told his staff he’d go to the White House to read it.

What the Whistleblower Says, and How the CIA Responded

This document release does not stand alone. It corroborates the sworn testimony of CIA whistleblower James Erdman, who told Paul’s committee on May 13, 2026 that Fauci helped steer the intelligence community’s COVID-origins assessment toward the NIH-funded scientists behind Proximal Origin.

The agency’s reaction tells you something. As the hearing was about to gavel in, the CIA’s own spokesperson took to X to call the proceeding “dishonest political theater” and to disparage Erdman as someone not “appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of the truth.” Note what she did not dispute: in the same post, she affirmed that “the CIA has already assessed COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak.” The agency now concedes the lab-leak conclusion. Its public energy went toward attacking the officer who came forward, not toward defending the natural-origin story it had spent years protecting.

When the people with the most to hide spend their fire on the messenger, you tend to be over the target.

Why This Matters

A fair reader should hold two things at once. Reviewing intelligence papers, advising defense panels, getting briefed during a crisis — none of that is a crime, and some of it is exactly what a senior health official should do. The documents are partly redacted, the committee is releasing them with its own framing, and a complete picture will require the rest of the record.

But the core sequence does not depend on interpretation. Fauci knew, in 2003, that engineered pathogens could be built to be “worse than any disease known to man.” He treated the engineering question, in January 2020, as serious enough for the FBI and MI5. He then helped shape — and arranged not to be credited on — the paper that told the public the question was closed. And in 2021 he read the classified intelligence in a vault and walked out pushing the same authors’ public talking points to the officials running the review.

The American people were told one story. The documents, and a CIA officer’s sworn oath, tell another. Your government works for you. You deserve to see which one is true.

All quotations above are drawn from the documents released by Chairman Rand Paul’s committee on June 11, 2026, and from the committee’s published timeline. Read the full release and the source emails for yourself.

That is the man who now sits as Director of the National Institutes of Health. And in the May issue of Imprimis, he laid out exactly what he intends to do with the chair they once used against him.

This is the blueprint.

The Sentence That Frames Everything

Bhattacharya opens not with grievance but with history:

“At the root of the scientific revolution was the idea that there was not and should never be a scientific authority.”

Sit with that for a second, because it is the whole argument in one line. For centuries, a handful of ecclesiastical powers decided what was true — whether the moons of Jupiter actually moved. The scientific revolution took that power away from the authorities and handed it to anyone with a telescope and an honest method.

Then he delivers the indictment we lived through:

“Unfortunately, we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people... have the power to say what is true or false in science.”

Agency directors. WHO officials. Journal editors. A new priesthood, issuing rulings, excommunicating heretics. Everyone reading Rational Ground already knows this in their bones, because we were the heretics. What’s new is that the person saying it out loud is no longer shouting from the outside. He is holding the keys.

He Defends the Institution Before He Reforms It

Here’s where Bhattacharya proves he is a builder and not a wrecker. Before he lists a single problem, he makes “a historical defense of the National Institutes of Health.”

And it’s a real one. Heart attack prevention. Nearly every cancer treatment we have. Therapies for rheumatoid arthritis that were science fiction when he was a med student in the 1990s. A livable future for cystic fibrosis patients who used to die in their teens. Two cures for sickle cell anemia. The NIH funds 85 percent of biomedical research in this country, and the return on that bet has been staggering.

This matters. The easy move for a man treated the way he was treated is to burn the house down. Bhattacharya’s move is the harder, more conservative one: the institution is worth saving. It has simply stopped doing its job.

His proof is brutal in its simplicity. Since 2010, despite historic sums poured into medical research, American life expectancy has flatlined while Sweden’s kept climbing. We are spending more and getting less. “Make America Healthy Again,” he writes, “can be seen as a political slogan. But it can also be seen as a cry for help from the American people.”

Then he names the three diseases eating science from the inside.

Problem One: The Replication Crisis

Were eggs trying to kill you, or are they a superfood? Depends which decade you ask. Bhattacharya didn’t eat an egg until he was 19, and when he finally did it was a tasteless egg-white omelet, because the 1990s had decided yolks were poison.

That whiplash isn’t a quirk. It’s the replication crisis. Scientists publish, the TV repeats it, your doctor adopts it — and then someone runs the same experiment and gets a different answer. Which means a lot of what we “know” simply isn’t true.

His former Stanford colleague John Ioannidis put it in a 2005 title that has aged into prophecy: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Bhattacharya’s diagnosis of why is bracing for anyone who treats “peer-reviewed” as a synonym for “true”:

“Peer reviewers do not double check the data of a study. They just look at it and then accept or reject it. Peer review is not a measure of scientific truth; it is basically a measure of approval by an editor.”

How many times during Covid were we told to sit down and shut up because something was “peer-reviewed”? The Director of the NIH just told you that phrase is a measure of editorial approval, not fact.

The fix is refreshingly concrete. Fund replication directly. Treat someone replicating your work as an honor, not a threat. The Autism Data Science Initiative already builds in replication teams. And in a move so obvious it’s maddening nobody did it sooner, PubMed is getting a replication button — click a paper and see whether anyone ever reproduced it.

Problem Two: Scientific Stagnation

The second disease is that we get less and less discovery per research dollar than we did fifty years ago. In the 1960s, each breast-cancer paper bought real gains in survival. Today, per paper, the gains are a fraction of that.

Why? Because the system rewards safe, derivative work. Bhattacharya ran a fascinating study tracing every new word and phrase in biomedicine year by year, and found that NIH support for genuinely new ideas collapsed after 2000. Meanwhile the average age of a scientist’s first NIH grant climbed from the mid-30s in 1980 to the mid-40s today — even though the young are where new ideas live. He quotes Max Planck’s grim line that new truths win only because “their opponents eventually die,” and then says the quiet part: our job is to make sure that stops being how progress happens.

His solution borrows from Silicon Valley. Fund bold bets that might fail, because a productive failure teaches you something and the next swing pays off. The old “payline” system scored grants mostly on methodological safety and quietly strangled innovation. The new Unified Funding Strategy empowers reviewers to greenlight bleeding-edge work that might not pan out but would be a genuine breakthrough if it did. Judge the portfolio by whether Americans get healthier — not by how many tidy projects cleared the bar.

Problem Three: Funding Concentration

The third disease is a cartel. About one-third of all NIH grant money flows to roughly 20 institutions. Not because the only good scientists are at those 20 schools, but because of how the money is structured. Grants cover direct research costs and indirect “facilities” costs, so the dollars pool wherever the electron microscopes already are — and inside those elite labs, the senior people get first crack while the young and hungry wait their turn.

Bhattacharya’s fix is to sever the link between research money and facilities money, forcing a real market where institutions outside the top 20 can compete. Spread the seed, and you spread the science — because NIH money is the magnet that pulls in everything else.

Why This One Lands Differently

You could read all of this as dry administrative reform. Paylines and indirect-cost formulas don’t exactly trend. But step back and look at what’s actually being proposed.

Every one of the three fixes attacks the same enemy: concentrated authority. Replication takes truth back from the editors and hands it to anyone willing to redo the work. Funding new ideas takes the future back from the gatekeepers who only bet on the safe and the senior. Breaking up the funding cartel takes opportunity back from the 20 anointed institutions. The man who opened by declaring that science should have no authority is methodically dismantling the machinery of authority, one lever at a time, from inside the building that once tried to destroy him.

That is the story here. Not revenge. Reform that follows directly from the principle they punished him for defending.

We spent the Covid years being told that “trust the science” meant trust the people who held the offices. Bhattacharya is offering the opposite definition, and he’s offering it as policy: gold-standard science is science that is replicable, that lives at the bleeding edge, and that backs promising scientists wherever they happen to be — not whoever happens to hold the microphone.

He calls it a second scientific revolution. After the last five years, we’ll take it. And we’ll be watching to see that the levers actually move.

Read Jay Bhattacharya’s full essay, “Launching a Second Scientific Revolution,” in Imprimis (Hillsdale College), May 2026.

Other articles in Rational Ground

On March 3, 2026, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota — better known by its initials, CIDRAP — published an op-ed under a headline that, if you’ve read this Substack for any length of time, you have been waiting four years to read out loud:

“The COVID vaccine myocarditis signal was real but is now resolved.”

Read that sentence twice. The first half is the admission. The second half is the trick.

The signal was real. That is the public-health establishment, in print, in 2026, finally saying out loud the thing it spent 2021, 2022, 2023, and most of 2024 calling misinformation. The signal was real. The mRNA shots were causing inflammation of the heart muscle in young people — disproportionately in young males — at rates the manufacturers and the federal agencies that approved the manufacturers’ product had every reason to know about. It was real. Everyone who said so was right.

Now it is “resolved.”

Resolved like a code-review ticket. Resolved like a customer-service complaint. Resolved like an outstanding invoice. Resolved, in a single passive-voice past participle, with no agent, no actor, no one to thank or hold accountable. The signal was real. It is now resolved. And we will be moving on.

I would like to take a moment to introduce you to the word’s actual job.

What Actually Happened This Year

Three regulatory events tell you what “resolved” is meant to bury.

June 25, 2025 — FDA finalizes the new warning. The Food and Drug Administration approved required updated warnings in the labeling of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines regarding myocarditis and pericarditis. Four years and four months after the first reported case. After tens of millions of doses. The label, at long last, told the truth.

February 20, 2026 — FDA issues the formal approval letter to Pfizer. Comirnaty’s prescribing information now includes incidence numbers for the 2023–2024 formula and the results of a cardiac MRI study showing the highest myocarditis rates in males aged 16 through 25 — roughly 27 cases per million doses in that group, on the reformulated product. A real, measurable, repeatedly-detected harm in the exact population that was relentlessly told the shot was safer for them than the virus.

March 18–19, 2026 — ACIP votes 12-0. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the committee whose recommendations the CDC has historically rubber-stamped, voted unanimously to drop the universal COVID-19 vaccine recommendation. Going forward, ACIP recommends the mRNA vaccines on a “shared clinical decision-making” basis — meaning a patient and their physician must affirmatively decide together that the shot is right for that patient. No one is being walked into a pharmacy and handed a Comirnaty needle on the theory that it is the patriotic thing to do. The era of universal mRNA COVID recommendation, in other words, is over.

That is what the public-health establishment did in the eight months between June 2025 and March 2026 and we thank you for it.

Then, two weeks before that ACIP vote, CIDRAP published the op-ed.

“The COVID vaccine myocarditis signal was real but is now resolved. ACIP’s March agenda pretends otherwise.”

In other words: the federal advisory committee was about to look at this signal one more time, and the public-health establishment wanted to make sure everyone read the room before they did. The signal was real. The signal is now resolved. Don’t dwell on this. Don’t ask what changed. Don’t ask who lied. Move on.

“Resolved” Is Not A Medical Word

I have been doing this beat for five years. I know the vocabulary of how the public-health establishment moves a story it would prefer you stopped telling. I have watched it in real time on lockdowns, on school closures, on the lab-leak hypothesis, on natural immunity, and now on this. The vocabulary is small, and it is the same every time:

• Settled science — what they call a hypothesis they are tired of defending.

• Misinformation — what they call a fact they cannot yet refute.

• Evolving guidance — what they call a reversal they don’t want to call a reversal.

• Resolved — what they call a wound they would like you to stop pointing at.

“Resolved” is what an insurer says about a claim once the check clears. It is what a manager says about a complaint after the meeting. It is what HR says about a workplace investigation after the file is closed.

It is not what cardiology says about a twenty-two-year-old whose left ventricle is still scarred.

The signal is not resolved for him. It is not resolved for the parents who watched their son have his first cardiac episode at his sister’s high-school graduation. It is not resolved for the families of the young men in the case reports. The shots gave them an illness. The system reformulated the shots and called the illness “resolved” because the shots in the cabinet today, by the establishment’s own numbers, cause fewer of these cases than the shots in the cabinet four years ago.

A real signal four years late is still a real signal. Reformulated is not undone. And the people standing at the cemetery do not care about your formulation.

We Called This A Year Ago

Long-time RG readers will remember a piece I ran here on May 21, 2025: “Failure to Warn: How the Feds Downplayed Myocarditis and Let Americans Pay the Price.”

The headline came from a Senate report. The report concluded that federal health officials had suppressed and downplayed myocarditis warnings out of concern that those warnings would erode vaccine confidence. The report did not call it “resolved.” The report called it failure to warn — and that phrase, failure to warn, is a product-liability term of art. It is what a jury writes on a verdict slip in a courtroom when a manufacturer or its regulators knew about a risk and elected not to tell the people taking it.

The Senate, in May 2025, said the federal government failed to warn.

The FDA, in June 2025, updated the warning.

ACIP, in March 2026, dropped the universal recommendation.

CIDRAP, two weeks before that, called it “resolved.”

You can tell that vocabulary is doing work because three of those four sentences are about admissions and one of them is about closure. The first three are receipts. The fourth is an attempt to take the receipts off the table.

What We Owe The Injured

The word resolved has no place in this story until the people who were injured are made whole. They have not been. They have not been compensated. They have not been studied at the scale they deserve. The federal Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program — the program that exists, on paper, to compensate Americans for injuries from pandemic countermeasures — has, by every public accounting, paid out a vanishing fraction of the claims filed against it; the eligibility criteria are unreachable; the program is, in any meaningful sense, broken.

If you want to call something “resolved,” start there. Pay them. Track them. Tell them what we learned, and when, and who knew it, and what was decided to be said out loud and what was decided to be buried. Then — and only then — get out the past participle.

Until that day, resolved is a euphemism. And RG readers know what to call a euphemism in the public-health establishment’s mouth.

It is a confession.

— Justin

P.S. The Senate’s May 2025 “Failure to Warn” report remains the foundational document. If you haven’t read it, you should. RG covered it here. Every paragraph of last year’s findings holds up. Every paragraph of this year’s “resolved” framing collapses on contact with it.

Watch the clip. (I’ll wait.)

Here is the tweet that surfaced it:

🚨 BOOM. Career CIA Operations Officer just testified under oath: The COVID lab leak was a deliberate COVER-UP, and Dr. Fauci was in the middle of it.

“I am a career CIA Operations officer… The Intelligence Community’s actions resulted in a cover-up.”

- IC leaders downplayed… pic.twitter.com/v6sEMZuqXP

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) May 13, 2026

The exact words, under oath: “I am a career CIA Operations officer… The Intelligence Community’s actions resulted in a cover-up.”

That is a career intelligence officer, on the record, raising his hand and using the C-word: cover-up.

What He Was Actually Talking About

For anyone newer to this list — what the witness is describing did not start with the CIA. It started with five virologists, one conference call, and a manuscript called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

“Proximal Origin” was published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. Five authors: Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Edward Holmes, Robert Garry, and W. Ian Lipkin. Its central claim — that SARS-CoV-2 “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” and that a laboratory origin scenario is “implausible” — became the single most cited piece of “the science” in the entire pandemic. It was the paper journalists pointed at when they called you a conspiracy theorist for asking about Wuhan. It was the paper trotted out at congressional hearings, on cable news, in fact-checks, in social-media takedowns. It was the wall.

What the world did not know, until House Oversight pried it out in 2023, was the chronology behind that paper.

• January 31, 2020: Sir Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust (later WHO Chief Scientist) is privately warning that the virus “looked almost engineered to infect human cells.”

• February 1, 2020: Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins convene a now-infamous conference call with ~12 international scientists — Andersen, Rambaut, Holmes, Garry, Farrar, others. On that call several of the participants tell the rest that the genome looks engineered or, at minimum, looks like it had been through serial passage in a lab.

• February 4, 2020: Andersen’s private Slack/email language is still alarmed — gain-of-function on the table.

• February 4, 2020 (later that day): A draft of “Proximal Origin” is shared. Its public conclusion now matches none of the private alarm. Lab origin is “implausible.”

• March 17, 2020: The paper publishes in Nature Medicine. Andersen and Garry — who had privately written that the genome was “inconsistent with evolutionary theory“ — sign their names to the opposite conclusion in public.

That is the gap. That is the cover-up. Six weeks between “this looks engineered” and “lab origin is implausible,” with the same people on both ends of the sentence, and the head of NIAID quietly riding shotgun the whole way. The House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, after compiling more than 8,000 pages of documents and roughly 25 hours of testimony, used a four-word title for what it found:

“The anatomy of a cover-up.”

What We’ve Said, On the Record, For Three Years

I do not claim credit. I claim receipts.

If you want to walk the timeline, Rational Ground has been documenting this in real time:

• 2023-07-11 — “Covid Origin Story Cover-up REVEALED — Part 1” — our walkthrough of the House Oversight investigation, the day it dropped.

• 2023-07-11 — “Kristian Andersen Grilled on Capitol Hill” — Andersen, lead author of “Proximal Origin,” in front of Congress trying to explain the gap between his private words and his public ones.

• 2023-09-12 — “Explosive New Claims Say CIA Tried to Bury Lab Leak Theory” — the first time an internal CIA whistleblower told a congressional committee the Agency had paid analysts to change their conclusions.

• 2023-09-27 — “Did the CIA Smuggle Dr. Fauci into Langley to Coerce Covid Decisions?”

• 2025-01-28 — “The Lab Leak: The CIA Finally Joins the Obvious Truth” — the Agency’s formal “low confidence” lab-leak assessment.

• 2025-02-03 — “The Smoking Gun: U.S. Funded COVID’s Patient Zero” — the $41 million money trail from NIAID and USAID through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and, specifically, to Ben Hu, the WIV researcher who fell ill in November 2019.

None of that was hidden. It was all there. You just had to be willing to be called a conspiracy theorist for two years before it became “intelligence consensus.”

Why Today’s Testimony Is Different

The CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Energy have all moved, one after the other, toward a lab-leak finding. Good. Important. But every one of those statements has been carefully wrapped in cotton wool: “low confidence,” “most likely,” “consistent with.”

Today’s witness did not wrap his statement in anything. He used the word “cover-up.” He said it under oath. He named the Intelligence Community as the actor. And — listen carefully to the clip — he said the cover-up was deliberate and that “IC leaders downplayed” the lab-origin assessment.

Three things change because of that:

1. It’s perjury bait now. Once a career officer testifies that the IC ran a cover-up, every IC official who previously told Congress something different — including the ones who pushed back on Pottinger, the ones who slow-walked the FOIAs, the ones who briefed reporters off the record — is on a clock. You don’t get to be vague after someone has been specific under oath.

2. The “Proximal Origin” five are no longer being asked about a scientific paper. They are being asked about a coordinated information operation. That is a different conversation. A scientific paper can be wrong; an information operation has authors, funders, and beneficiaries. The Subcommittee already documented Fauci’s funding relationship with EcoHealth, EcoHealth’s funding relationship with WIV, and WIV’s research relationship with Ben Hu. The line connecting “Proximal Origin” to “the cover-up of who funded the lab that leaked the virus” is now drawn in front of a witness who is willing to say so out loud.

3. The political insurance policy is gone. “Proximal Origin” was the document the entire censorship apparatus pointed at when it banned doctors, scientists, parents, and (full disclosure) people like me from social media for asking the question. If the paper itself was the product of a deliberate cover-up, every act of censorship that flowed downstream from it inherits that taint. The Murthy v. Missouri consent decree, the Berenson v. Biden settlement, the active First Amendment cases the Liberty Justice Center is still litigating — all of them touch this rock.

The Long Arc

I have been doing this since the spring of 2020 — when our little ragtag team of analysts, parents, doctors, and stubborn citizens started a Twitter feed because someone had to put real numbers next to the policy claims. Most of those people were called liars, cranks, grifters, granny killers. A lot of them were thrown off platforms. A few of them, including me, sued.

Today a career CIA Operations Officer sat in front of Congress and used the word cover-up.

That isn’t the end of the story. There are people in this who have not yet been deposed, FOIAs that have not yet been honored, indictments that have not yet been written. Anthony Fauci received a preemptive pardon for a reason. Jeremy Farrar is still in his job at the WHO. Kristian Andersen still has tenure. The five authors of “Proximal Origin” have never been asked, all together, in the same room, under oath, the same question.

But the witness today moved the line. The official position of the United States Intelligence Community is no longer “we don’t know” or “low confidence.” The official position, as of this afternoon, includes the testimony of a career officer who said the Intelligence Community ran a cover-up.

That is what accountability sounds like when it arrives late.

More to come — on this case, on mine, and on the rest of the docket.

(If you’ve stood with Rational Ground through the years when this was a conspiracy theory — thank you. The receipts file is your receipts file. Paid subscribers fund the next FOIA, the next deposition, the next piece.)

We watched it with the lab leak. We watched it with masks. We watched it with school closures. We watched it with natural immunity. We watched it with myocarditis. We watched it with vaccine injury reporting. We watched it with DNA contamination.

The frustrating part was never just that institutions got things wrong. Everyone gets things wrong in a crisis. The deeper wound was that the people asking reasonable questions — parents, physicians, data analysts, small-business owners, vaccine-injured patients, and dissenting scientists — were treated as if their questions were a threat.

But something important has changed.

Some of the people who stood with us through the madness — Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and others who understood early that COVID policy had become cruel, unscientific, and destructive — are now in positions of real influence. They know what it was like to be on the receiving end of the smear machine. They know what questions were suppressed. They know where the bodies are buried, figuratively and, in some cases, literally.

And because of that, we are finally getting results.

That is the spirit in which I want to look at the newest cancer-signal literature. Not panic. Not a victory lap. Not a simplistic claim that one paper proves everything. Biology is messier than that, and cancer is never a one-variable story.

The better question is: do we now see enough signal to investigate honestly, with people in charge who actually want the answer?

The answer is yes.

And for the first time in a long time, there is reason to be grateful that the question might actually be allowed.

This is not one study. It is a convergence.

A new Italian population-wide cohort study followed nearly 300,000 residents in Pescara province from 2021 through 2023. The vaccinated group showed lower all-cause mortality — an important caveat — but also a higher likelihood of hospitalization for cancer compared with the unvaccinated group: HR 1.23, 95% CI 1.11–1.37. The authors were cautious, noting healthy-vaccinee bias and unmeasured confounders. Good. That is how honest science should sound. But the signal was there. (Italian cohort study)

Then came an even larger South Korean study using Seoul National Health Insurance data on 8.4 million people. It reported increased one-year risks after COVID vaccination for multiple cancers: thyroid, gastric, colorectal, lung, breast, and prostate. The pattern varied by vaccine type. Again, the authors did not declare the matter settled. They called for more research. But the finding is not a rumor on Telegram. It is a large population-based cohort study in the peer-reviewed literature. (South Korea cohort study)

A systematic review indexed at PubMed found 69 publications meeting inclusion criteria, including 66 article-level reports describing 333 patients across 27 countries. The authors identified recurrent themes: unusually rapid progression, recurrence or reactivation of previously controlled disease, atypical pathology involving injection sites or regional lymph nodes, and plausible immune mechanisms involving tumor dormancy and immune escape. Their conclusion was not “case closed.” It was that this is an early safety-signal detection phase demanding rigorous epidemiologic, histopathological, forensic, and mechanistic follow-up. (Systematic review / PubMed)

That is exactly the posture public health should have taken from the beginning.

What is encouraging now is that the posture is changing. The reflexive dismissal is weaker. The data is more available. The people asking these questions are harder to exile. And some of the officials now in the room understand, from personal experience, why “trust us” is not enough.

The mechanism question is no longer theoretical.

For years, the public was assured that the shots stayed in the arm, that the mRNA disappeared quickly, and that anyone worried about longer-term biological effects simply did not understand the technology.

That story has not aged well.

A 2025 transcriptomic study looked at people with new-onset adverse events or cancers after mRNA vaccination and found widespread transcriptional dysregulation. In the cancer group, the authors reported signals involving genomic instability, epigenetic reprogramming, immune signaling, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other stress pathways. The authors concluded that these molecular signatures may help explain post-vaccine complications, including oncogenesis or progression of malignant disease in susceptible individuals. (Transcriptomic dysregulation study)

A case report described spike protein detected in metastatic breast carcinoma cells, possibly derived from mRNA vaccination. (PubMed case report) Another report described genomic integration and molecular dysregulation in a young woman with aggressive stage IV bladder cancer after a Moderna series. (IJRIMS case report)

Are case reports proof of population-level causation? No.

Are they exactly the kind of biological smoke that a serious safety system is supposed to investigate? Obviously.

And when you place them beside the DNA contamination story, the picture gets harder to dismiss.

Back in November, I wrote How DNA Ended Up in the COVID Vials (and How Regulators Chose Not to See It). The basic point was simple: these products were sold to the public as clean, short-lived mRNA instructions, but independent researchers were finding residual plasmid DNA in the vials — and, worse, evidence that the official testing methods may have been structured in a way that missed much of it.

Then in January, I covered the follow-up: BREAKING: New Study Reveals WHY Regulators Missed the DNA Contamination in mRNA Vaccines. Kevin McKernan, Charles Rixey, and Jessica Rose showed that RNA:DNA hybrids could survive the standard DNase cleanup process, creating a greater than 100-fold discrepancy depending on what assay was used.

That matters because lipid nanoparticles are not decorative packaging. They are delivery systems. Their job is to move genetic material into cells.

So when critics asked whether residual DNA, spike expression, immune dysregulation, and oncogenic pathways deserved a hard look, the honest answer should have been: yes, immediately.

Thankfully, that question is no longer confined to the margins. It is moving into the literature, into public debate, and — at last — into the world of people with the authority to do something about it.

“Turbo cancer” is not a magic phrase. It is a warning label.

The term “turbo cancer” is not a formal oncology classification. It is clinical shorthand — sometimes imprecise, sometimes overused — for a pattern physicians and patients began reporting: unusually rapid cancers, relapses after remission, and aggressive disease appearing close in time to vaccination or infection.

A review in the Journal of Independent Medicine attempts to define and organize that phenomenon. It argues that reports of advanced-stage, fast-moving, or relapsing cancers after COVID mRNA vaccination warrant scientific inquiry rather than dismissal. (JIM review)

Another literature review summarized at The Focal Points identifies 17 proposed mechanisms by which mRNA shots may initiate, accelerate, or reactivate cancer, including genome instability, immune escape, impaired DNA repair, chronic inflammation, immune dysregulation, and RNA disruption. (17 mechanisms summary)

You can dispute mechanisms. You can argue about strength of evidence. You can say some of the case reports are weak, some are stronger, and some are confounded by prior infection, prior disease, age, screening disruption, or other variables.

Fine.

That is what science is supposed to do.

But what you cannot honestly say anymore is that there is nothing to investigate.

The excess mortality backdrop makes the question urgent.

One of the most provocative pieces in this stack is The Ethical Skeptic’s long-running excess mortality analysis, which claims that since the mass mRNA rollout, the United States has seen more than 900,000 excess non-COVID, non-unnatural deaths and more than 138,000 excess cancer deaths. (The State of Things Pandemic)

This is not a peer-reviewed paper. It is an independent analysis, and it should be treated as something that needs replication, critique, and official engagement.

But that is precisely the point.

If a private analyst can produce a detailed ICD-code mortality signal suggesting a massive cancer excess, and if large population studies in Italy and Korea are simultaneously reporting cancer associations, and if case reports and mechanistic papers are simultaneously describing plausible biological pathways, then the right response is serious replication.

This is where the current moment is different.

For years, the plea was: release the data.

Now, increasingly, the data is being released, the old gatekeeping is losing power, and the people who know why these questions matter are in a position to demand better answers.

That deserves gratitude.

It also creates responsibility. The next step is not just to celebrate that better people are in the room. The next step is to use this opening well:

Where possible, build CDC and FDA matched cohort analyses.

Study lot-level cancer outcomes.

Support autopsy and tissue programs.

Compare long-term outcomes by dose, product, age, sex, prior infection, and baseline risk.

Link cancer registries to vaccination, infection, and mortality data with appropriate privacy protections.

Create public dashboards that let independent analysts test, replicate, and challenge the findings.

That is how trust starts to come back: not by demanding blind faith, but by letting the evidence breathe.

This is why the new leadership matters.

In Why We Lost Trust, I wrote that public trust did not collapse because Americans suddenly became anti-science. It collapsed because institutions got major questions wrong, enforced their errors with power, punished dissent, and then refused to account for the damage.

That is why the presence of people like Bhattacharya, Makary, and others matters so much. They are not abstract technocrats parachuting into a controversy they never understood. They lived through the same institutional failure. They saw what happened to families, schools, churches, children, businesses, and honest scientists when COVID policy became a crusade instead of a discipline.

This new cancer literature belongs inside that broader reckoning — but the tone of this moment should not only be anger. It should also be gratitude that the questions are no longer orphaned.

When we said lockdowns would cause medical harms, including missed cancer screenings, we were told that the emergency justified it. Now the delayed-care damage is documented, and I compiled much of it in The Complete Reckoning: 150+ Studies on the Devastating Harms of COVID Lockdown Policies.

When people said the unvaccinated had rational reasons to hesitate, they were treated as defective citizens. Later, in How the “Unvaccinated” Got It Right, we revisited the actual risk calculus: low absolute COVID risk for many people, no long-term safety data, changing efficacy claims, and a public-health regime that replaced informed consent with coercion.

When myocarditis signals appeared, the early posture was denial and minimization. Then the literature grew. We covered it in The Truth About Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis, Video: 388 Studies of Post-Vaccine Myocarditis, and Ignoring the Heart of the Matter.

When vaccine-injury reports accumulated, patients were told they were anxious, confused, or politically contaminated. Then even the FDA had to acknowledge serious pediatric safety questions, as I covered in Breaking! FDA Finally Admits It: At Least 10 Healthy Kids Likely Died from COVID Vaccines.

When the lab leak was obvious enough to investigate, it was branded racist conspiracy theory. Years later, former CDC Director Robert Redfield was saying out loud what many of us had argued from the beginning, which I covered in Former CDC Director Drops Bombshells: Lab Leak, Vaccine Warnings, and the Cover-Up.

This is not a record of paranoia.

It is a record of delayed admissions.

The standard now should be: follow the signal wherever it leads.

A real safety culture treats uncertainty as a reason to investigate, not as a reason to sneer.

The mRNA rollout was the largest pharmacovigilance challenge in history. Billions of doses. Novel platform. Compressed trials. Legal immunity. Mandates. Massive variation by age and risk. A public told, often aggressively, that hesitation was not merely wrong but immoral.

That history cannot be undone. The families and businesses that were submarined by ridiculous policies cannot get those years back. The children who lost school years cannot simply be made whole. The people injured or bereaved cannot be repaired by a new dashboard.

But we can be grateful that the next chapter is different.

The cancer signal now deserves what myocarditis deserved, what excess deaths deserved, what DNA contamination deserved, and what the public deserved from the start:

• lot-level analysis

• dose-response analysis

• product-specific comparisons

• prior-infection stratification

• age- and sex-specific risk tables

• cancer registry linkage

• autopsy and tissue studies

• independent replication

• full disclosure of manufacturer data where legally possible

• and protection for physicians and researchers who report adverse events.

This is not about revenge.

It is about repair.

It is about making sure the people who were right to ask hard questions are finally joined by institutions willing to answer them.

What we can say now

We can say that multiple peer-reviewed papers and case reports now describe cancer signals temporally associated with COVID vaccination or infection.

We can say that two large population-level studies — Italy and South Korea — report cancer associations after vaccination, while acknowledging confounding and the need for further research.

We can say that the literature now includes mechanistic claims involving immune dysregulation, genomic instability, spike persistence, DNA contamination, transcriptomic disruption, and impaired cancer surveillance.

We can say that independent mortality analysis is raising a large excess-cancer-death question that deserves official replication.

We can say that the old public-health posture — “there is nothing to see here” — is no longer defensible.

And we can say one more thing.

The people who asked these questions early were not the problem.

They were the early-warning system.

The reckoning keeps widening

Six years ago, Rational Ground existed because the official narrative was diverging from the data in real time.

That was true on schools.

It was true on masks.

It was true on lockdowns.

It was true on natural immunity.

It was true on censorship.

It was true on myocarditis.

It was true on DNA contamination.

Now the cancer question has entered a new phase: early reports, accumulating literature, better access to data, and the possibility — finally — of honest institutional follow-through.

The people demanding answers were not crazy.

They were early.

The correct response is not panic. It is not simplistic certainty. It is not pretending every cancer diagnosis has one cause.

The correct response is honest investigation — with the full power of agencies now influenced by people who understand why the investigation matters.

If the signal is wrong, transparency will show it.

If the signal is real, transparency will help us quantify it, understand it, and protect people.

Either way, this is what we asked for: not blind vindication, but the chance to let evidence outrun narrative.

For that, I am grateful.

The people who stood by our side during the COVID madness are no longer only writing declarations from the outside.

Some of them are now inside the room.

And results are beginning to follow.