So, President Trump took another tack. On September 4, he issued two Executive Orders (EOs) – one directing the USDA to expand interstate meat sales (aimed at helping the little guy rancher/farmer ship meat across state lines, something the nation’s four biggest meat producers do); and a second directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to start delisting gray and Mexican wolves (known for their predation), while also directing the USDA to review mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef.

More specifically, “Promoting Fair Competition in Livestock Markets and Expanding Market Access for American Meat Producers” seeks to counter unfair trade practices and monopolization in the meat processing industry, expand small-scale processing facilities with USDA support, reduce burdensome regulations, and lower processing costs for producers and consumers alike.

And “Supporting America’s Ranchers” addresses rancher concerns over wolf predation, directs the USDA to assess whether the U.S. can legally impose country-of-origin labeling, and closes with an all-agency directive to “benefit American consumers in the form of lower prices to the maximum extent possible.” Country-of-origin labeling is a hot topic for ranchers and diners alike.

Concurrent with these September 4 executive orders, the USDA announced four new initiatives to support producers through its existing Ranchers First Initiative.

The agency is expanding the use of its Conservation Reserve Program to enroll nearly 1 million new acres of grasslands; doubling the number of producers and plants in its remote grading program, which employs modern technology to more efficiently grade beef carcasses remotely; increasing adoption of instrument-enhanced grading technology; and becoming more aggressive in defending agricultural producers from abusive litigation.

Still, President Trump is stuck in a conundrum not of his making, and the entire nation is stuck with him.

Years of severe drought, industry consolidation, and low profitability have shrunk the U.S. beef herd to its lowest numbers in 75 years. The RFK Jr.-fueled MAHA revolution has increased consumer demand for domestic beef, especially organic, grass-fed cuts and burger, beef tallow, and all foods wholesome and local. An unprecedented decrease in livestock supply has now collided with a spike in supermarket demand, which has spiked.

The nation’s food pyramid now recommends meats and fewer carbohydrates. Cheeseburgers are no longer condemned as dangerous but are now embraced as healthy. As a result, a pound of hamburger that cost $5.19 in March 2019 has increased 62%, to an average of $8.41 per pound in July 2026.

This is a perfect economic storm for hamburger prices, amplified by the upcoming midterms, during which affordability features prominently in voters’ minds.

The MAHA movement is truly bipartisan. Most of those No Kings protesters (if not vegan) are likely frequent visitors to local farmers’ markets, or pay top dollar for local grass-fed tenderloin. Yet much like the egg price crisis of early 2025, President Trump will be faulted for high beef prices despite his best efforts, including those two recent EOs. Meanwhile, the ranchers he has alienated by trying to appease consumers may also stay home in November and not vote.

This is the Scylla and Charybdis the president must navigate for the midterms, but the nation will still face for years: how to rebuild the nation’s beef herd while accommodating greater MAHA demand for healthy hamburgers? If prices rise too high, struggling livestock owners benefit, but consumers may riot in the streets; if grocery store hamburger prices plummet, more U.S. ranchers will go bankrupt or quit, and the nation will depend ever more on foreign producers.

High beef prices also pressure ranchers and farmers to liquidate breeding stock, which is counter to expanding the nation’s herd. This is a national security issue as well as an economic and health one.

To his credit, President Trump has recognized the growing crisis and committed resources to finding solutions. In his February 6 proclamation, “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” he increased in-quota beef imports of lean trimmings from Argentina by 80,000 metric tons for the year. (Lean trimmings are added to U.S. domestic beef fat to make hamburgers.)

Unsurprisingly, prices have continued to climb, prompting the president’s controversial August 26 proclamation, “Further Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” which increased the permissible duty-exempt lean trimmings another 300,000 metric tons for 90 days, without limiting countries of origin. This infuriated many ranchers who felt betrayed by the administration.

The new 90-day window opened on September 3. President Trump subsequently referenced Brazil as a likely source of the lean trimmings. Both of these announcements spurred more criticism.

These efforts to deliver on campaign promises to lower grocery prices were followed by two executive orders designed to deliver on campaign promises to support America’s ranchers and farmers.

The problem of inflated beef prices facing Americans and the Trump administration will not be resolved overnight. Unlike chicken eggs or pork chops, U.S. agriculture cannot ramp up beef cow production overnight. Chickens lay eggs almost daily; pigs farrow (give birth) twice yearly, often with litters of a dozen or more piglets. But a cow generally has only one calf each year, which in turn requires 18 months (two years for grass-fed) to mature for market.

Market prices for hamburger meat will likely remain unchanged in the near term as many ranchers say the cost savings from expanded imports of lean trimmings will not trickle down to the consumer.

What is required in the long term is a profound reassessment of the U.S. food production system.

Speaking on the MAHA Media Hub on September 9, regenerative farmer Mollie Engelhart said that President Trump cannot unilaterally make the changes necessary to truly transform the U.S. beef industry and rebuild the national herd. Engelhart credits the president for focusing the nation on this vital cause, but explained that much more must be done.

“Ultimately, it needs to be a congressional movement,” she said. “It can’t be an executive order because an executive order can just get flipped by somebody else.”

Idaho cattle rancher Glenn Elzinga is skeptical that importing 300,000 metric tons of lean trimmings will have much impact on a market in which Americans eat some 76 million pounds of beef daily. However, he watched prices for feeder cattle (young animals raised for sale at maturity) slide about 10% on the import news, noting that most ranchers operate on single-digit profit margins.

“When the price drops 10%, things can go red in a hurry. Ranchers are NOT happy,” he told The MAHA Report in an email.

Elzinga believes the U.S. beef herd will be rebuilt slowly, but that hamburger prices will be high for some time.

“In the short term, it just gets uglier,” he said. “Heifer retention practices will probably fix the supply side of the economy no earlier than five years from now. But I could easily see it taking quite a bit longer than that.”

The beef market faces unique challenges that will likely keep burger prices high for some time. Yet many of the tensions the beef debate has presented extend to agriculture more widely and raise the question of how to produce healthier food for all Americans while ensuring the nation’s ranchers and farmers earn a fair income.

The MAHA movement has created greater demand for healthier foods. Over the long term, this will reduce healthcare costs and combat chronic disease. It will also create new marketing opportunities for America’s ranchers and farmers, both domestically and abroad.

MAHA consumers and the nation’s livestock producers must become strong allies. They need each other, and are growing more aware of that vital MAHA connection. Americans must come together to support both, just as President Trump is trying to do.

Register to watch the MAHA Summit live, September 29th

Register For The MAHA Summit

Previous IACC proposals funneled most federal research dollars to genetic research, which yielded little. According to Biology Insights, over 1,000 genes are associated with autism. If all of those caused autism, everyone would have the disorder.

The new plan acknowledges the failure of focusing on genes, writing, “Even using today’s most advanced tools, no specific genetic cause is identified in 75-85% percent of people with ASD, underscoring how much of ASD remains unexplained by identifiable genetic findings, the committee wrote.”

But even as the new plan takes shape, there’s a movement afoot to derail it. Why and by whom?

The new plan calls for defining and studying regression in autism, noting that a significant number of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder regressed in their development, losing acquired skills like the ability to walk and talk. For years, parents of children with autism have reported that their children regressed suddenly, often following vaccination, as comedian and actress Jenny McCarthy explains.

Why children with autism regress needs greater study. The IACC plan views autism as a biologically-based disability marked by a wide range of health and functional issues. It supports the current ongoing efforts while providing blueprints to fill the many gaps in crucially needed investments and calls for scaling research to meet the growing demand created by the autism epidemic.

The plan establishes timelines for research into the underlying biology of autism and developing effective treatments for the many co-morbid conditions people with autism frequently suffer, such as seizures, apraxia, mitochondrial dysfunction, gastrointestinal issues, immune dysfunction and chronic inflammation, and others.

The goal is to develop effective treatments, prevention strategies, and possible cures for autism. The plan calls for increasing communication support and assistive technology, caregiver support, and caring for aging people with autism, among other unmet needs.

And yet entrenched interests aligned with Big Pharma and old-guard public health devotees are attempting to derail the new plan, pushing to replace it with a plan that the Biden administration proposed three years ago which maintains the status quo of autism research and does little to improve the lives of people with autism.

Many of the plan’s critics are past IACC members who were not re-appointed to the IACC by Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [The IACC is composed of 23 representatives from federal agencies and 20 public members appointed by Secretary Kennedy. IACC members voted in the plan with 26 yeas, 1 nay, and 13 abstentions.]

These critics believe that the plan has a veiled anti-vaccine focus even though vaccines are not its focus, which is decidedly on studying regression and environmental causes of autism.

There is ample evidence to warrant further inquiry into autism’s environmental causes, as Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, addresses in The Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism.

However, one organization, the Autism Science Foundation, criticized the plan for not reflecting “scientific consensus” and called for even more dollars to be devoted to genetic research. [The director of the ASF is Alison Singer, a former IACC member.]

Secretary Kennedy has long called for a balanced approach in the search for understanding what causes autism. “This is a preventable disease,” Kennedy said at an April 2025 press conference on the autism epidemic. “We know it’s an environmental exposure; it has to be – genes do not cause epidemics . . . You need an environmental toxin.”

John Gilmore, an IACC public member and director of the Autism Action Network, praised the new plan.

“For the first time in twenty-five years we have a plan that embraces the full scope of autism with the goal of providing real help,” he said. “It’s a huge step forward and a departure from the status quo.”

Gilmore has called for the autism community and the MAHA movement to push back against the movement to derail the IACC’s plan, asking people to message their support here and politely call the White House [@212-456-1111].

Added Gilmore, “We finally have a plan that calls for rigorous analysis of what triggers autistic regression and developing treatments.”

It has been 20 years since Congress passed The Combating Autism Act. It is time to really do what Congress called for - end the autism epidemic and bring meaningful help to the autism community.

Please make those calls!

Related Reading

By Tony Lyons

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tony Lyons is an attorney and president and publisher at Skyhorse Publishing, publisher of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s, new runaway bestseller, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.” Below is the publisher’s note Lyons wrote in December 2021, and which appears on page xii of the book.

Complex scientific and moral problems are not resolved through censorship of dissenting opinions, deleting content from the internet or defaming scientists and authors who present information challenging to those in power.

Censorship leads instead to greater distrust of government institutions and large corporations.

Read more

With every exposed diary entry, text chain, subpoena, DOJ referral and guilty plea, it becomes increasingly obvious that Fauci was at the center of a vast criminal enterprise.

Make no mistake. It was a racket.

It is now understood from his diaries that Fauci was a narcissist, obsessed with power and money. He fostered and funded a culture where his virology and vaccinology pals ran ghoulish gain-of-function experiments, sharing their dangerous techniques with Communist China. Why do something that stupid?!

Fauci defended the idiotic enterprise in a 2012 editorial in the American Society for Microbiology. “In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” Fauci writes. “Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”

President Obama disagreed with this reasoning. He was so alarmed by gain-of-function research that he paused its funding in 2014.

President Barack Obama

2014 just happens to be the start date of Fauci’s pre-emptive pardon.

President Obama’s concerns didn’t matter to Fauci. He circumvented Obama’s orders and kept the gain-of-function arm of the racket going, continuing to fund, for example, University of North Carolina’s virologist, Ralph Baric.

When reasonable scientists questioned the research, Fauci turned the keys over to another self-absorbed maniac, Peter Daszak, and his EcoHealth Alliance. As Emily Kopp explains in this excellent U.S. Right to Know piece, “How Fauci’s inner circle shielded Wuhan lab’s U.S. collaborator,” Daszak funneled Fauci money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) so that the dark research could continue. Daszak was Fauci’s conduit to the WIV.

Those facts alone should lead to criminal charges. Fauci didn’t want to stop gain-of-function experiments.

Fauci did whatever he wanted.

Like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI long before him, Fauci consolidated power by remaining in his post for decades, perfecting his uniquely insane enterprise. In title, he was the director of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In theory, his job was protecting Americans from allergies and pandemics. In practice, Fauci was an abject failure – childhood allergies increased under Fauci’s reign. And, as Covid teaches us, pandemics were not prevented.

However, allergies and infectious diseases were not the focus of his real job. Fauci’s actual raison d’etre was to steer taxpayer dollars to the pharmaceutical industry so they could make new vaccines, new drugs, and eventually, piles of money.

Fauci ran the racket’s cash register. And he was really good at it. In the corporate captured world of vaccinology, Fauci was a big-time earner.

He was rewarded with fortune and fame. Why else would you stay in government service into your 80s?

And when the Covid virus escaped from the WIV – just like President Obama and right-minded researchers feared – Fauci used his influence and grant-gifting power to conspire with researchers he controlled to try to kill off the monster he had created. In emails released by Senator Rand Paul in his Reading Room, there’s no ambiguity that Fauci’s hand-selected, ethically compromised researchers didn’t buy the nonsense they ultimately published in the Proximal Origins paper, which argues that the virus emerged through “zoonotic spillover” rather than being engineered in a lab.

That is the way it is when you’re involved in organized crime. You know that you are doing evil things, but the money, lifestyle, and the culture of the enterprise compromise your judgement. You use the extra money to buy gifts for your family, but doesn’t it get difficult to live with yourself?

Fauci did not create the Covid virus. He created the culture that created the Covid virus. The result was a pandemic. The greatest public health disaster in history.

Well, poop happens.

Fauci quickly assumed the role of spokesperson for the public health establishment. The legacy media adored him and showered him with praise. Praise begot more praise. Fame begot more fame. Adoration begot more adoration.

And all the above begot more money.

Fauci monetized his big moment, directing his staff to apply for over $1 million in ‘award’ money. Doing so was certainly a crime and certainly unethical. But that didn’t matter. Fauci’s wife Christine Grady was responsible for overseeing ethics at the NIH. Her estimated personal wealth is $3 million. Do you think she’d bust her husband, ‘America’s Doctor’?

But the Grady train ended when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Grady was quietly released from her duties, taking with her that handsome $3 million nest egg on a government salary. Go figure.

Like I said, it was a racket.

And Fauci was untouchable, telling America to do all sorts of things in response to Covid – mask up, turn their backs on older relatives, wear goggles, and the list goes on.

His diary entries underscore the fact that he had no idea what he was doing. Nonetheless, Fauci directed the public health response while enjoying interviews with actor Julia Roberts and dinner with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Fauci loved the limelight, turning his growing platform into a mouthpiece for Big Pharma and its slate of new vaccines. However, within a few months of the vaccine roll out, CDC and other public health organs realized that the vaccine did not stop transmission.

That is a really important fact because the only justification for mandating a vaccine is that it prevents other people from catching the disease.

There was no such guarantee.

The facts didn’t matter. Fauci pushed Biden’s mandates. All sorts of people got strong-armed. Nurses who worked in hospital Covid units often got Covid. They risked their lives to treat people.

Heroes work here!

But if the nurse refused the vaccine (because they already had immunity) they were dismissed and often banned from working in other hospitals.

Career over.

Heroes get fired here!

And then came whispers of Covid vaccine injuries. Young athletes collapsing during sporting events. Healthy kids developing myocarditis. Neurological injuries. And, most recently, news that pregnant women who took the jab may have suffered miscarriages at an accelerated rate above the normal miscarriage rate.

How does Fauci get out of this one?

He texted then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about the “theoretical” concern about “cytokine storms” and an elevated risk of miscarriage.

Everyone agreed that this was in fact concerning. But Fauci’s crew said nothing.

Omerta is a racket requirement.

How bad was the rate of Covid vaccine-induced miscarriage? We don’t know yet. There is a debate about the research data, but no one knows exactly what happened to pregnant women and their unborn children.

This truth will out. We deserve to know. But a wall of silence protected everyone and, above all else, it protected the belief that vaccines are safe and effective and that all of us should trust the experts.

Do what you are told to do. Shut up and submit.

Where does all of this leave us?

Unprotected against the next time the racket re-emerges, and another expert directs people to do stupid things and risk our lives.

What we need is protection.

What we need is the right to say the most profound word a human can utter: “No.”

No, you cannot intimidate me, direct me, or manipulate me into risking my health by submitting to the whim of tyrannical, white-coated medical so-called experts.

Because they lie. They are compromised. They are captured by industries that profit from pushing their products on a public that really does want to trust authority but no longer can.

We need a national law ending vaccine mandates. Make it a crime to ever do this to us again, because it was a crime when they did it the last time.

If the experts say a vaccine is needed and safe, have this person show us the data and let us make our own choices.

Otherwise, please leave us alone.

Related Reading:

On The Real Food Show, the series the Department of Health and Human Services now streams weekly on YouTube, Kennedy cooks a full meal from scratch with a different chef each week, ,for $5 or less a serving.

The premiere kicked off with chef Andrew Gruel in his kitchen making wild Alaskan salmon cakes for $4.91 a serving in just 12 minutes.

“Good food is not more expensive food,” Kennedy says. “It’s just smarter.”

That is the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) idea in one line. MAHA starts with the quality of the food we buy and what we put on our plates.

Where the money really goes

The real drain on a grocery budget is not the meat counter. It is the aisle of chips, cookies, cereal, granola bars, and sugary soda and juices—all of it expensive and none of it real . It adds nothing but calories, leaves you hungrier than before, and derails your health.

Your budget often falls apart when life gets busy. Busy, tired families often reach for the quick, easy, but costly option because they think there’s no time to cook.

You must make the time. And if you cut the junk and sugary drinks, there will be more money for real food. Food economists agree that the cheapest way to meet your body’s nutritional needs is through whole food, not a processed version of it.

The staples that do the heavy work cost relatively little. A whole chicken runs about $2 a pound, while the boneless, skinless breasts can cost more than 2 times as much. Plain rice runs about 5 to 8 cents a serving, compared to 3 times that for instant rice. A dozen eggs runs about $3-5 and gives you some of the highest quality, digestible protein in the store.

Recently, CNN set out to debunk the show, buying every ingredient in full, ringing up $70.54 for a meal the “Real Food Show” priced at $19.64, and calling the $5-a-serving figure a mathematical slight of hand. But the trick was in their own math, since they included in the price an entire carton of eggs instead of just one; a jar of mayonnaise for a few tablespoons; and a full onion for eight cents’ worth. The leftover eggs, mayonnaise and onion don’t get thrown out; they go into the next meal.

The price per serving should only reflect what a recipe actually uses – a calculation the Washington Post critic calls perfectly standard. The one real cost comes from stocking a kitchen with real food ingredients: That will run more expensive the first week, although it pays you back every time you use those ingredients in different recipes.

Fast food that is actually food

The trick is having quick real food ready for the nights and mornings when everyone is tired and rushed. That is exactly when families give in to takeout and blow the budget. Secretary Kennedy makes the same case.

“Healthy eating doesn’t have to be expensive,” he said in launching the series, “and cooking at home can be faster, easier, and more rewarding than people think.”

As a mother of three busy kids, I learned all of this through experience. I fed a family of five on a budget, and a healthy dinner in 20 minutes that everyone liked and was never as hard or as stressful as people think. Grass-fed ground beef did a lot of the work, since it was often the cheaper, healthier option, and it easily became chili, tacos, stew, lettuce wraps, or a skillet dinner with tomatoes, garlic, onion, and seasoning. Add vegetables from the freezer, and Voilà , dinner is ready!

A healthy breakfast can be eggs, scrambled for 3 minutes in a pan with butter and toast on the side, or organic oats made with real maple syrup, butter, and cinnamon. Snacks can be an apple with peanut butter, carrots or celery with hummus, a boiled egg, or a handful of cheese. All of it full of nutrition, and none of it from the snack or processed food aisle—and faster than the drive-thru.

Buy meat the smart way

Meat is where the food budget can go off the rails, and the fix is pretty simple: buy the cheapest cuts, and buy them on sale. The cheaper cuts are often actually the most flavorful. Chuck roast, short ribs, or a package of stew meat cost a fraction of what steaks and chicken breasts do, and it’s easy to throw them in the slow cooker in the morning, add a few seasonings, and come home to a warm, delicious dinner.

On sale, skirt and flank steak can be a bargain too. Although they are tougher cuts of meat, when sliced thin across the grain they are perfect for tacos and stir-fry.

Most people skip these cuts only because they don’t recognize the names or know how to cook them, but most of these just need a slow cooker or a hot grill. And ground beef is the everyday workhorse, cheap and good for almost everything, and it goes even further if you stretch it with beans. Frozen seafood rounds out the quality proteins, especially when it’s on sale, and frozen fillets often beat the fresh seafood on price.

Keep the rest basic

Buy what is fresh and in season, and keep frozen vegetables on hand for everything else. It helps to always have tomatoes, onions, carrots, and celery in the refrigerator, since they are the perfect base for soups, stews, and to add to salads. A head of romaine lettuce beats a fancy plastic shell of baby greens on price every time. And don’t stress. You do not need to buy all your produce organic; but if you can spend a little extra, put it toward the Dirty Dozen, the most heavily sprayed fruits and vegetables.

Stop buying expensive, sugary cereal, chips and snack foods and sweet juices and soda. There is not much real nutrition in these foods. Instead, stock up on organic oats, real butter, and unsweetened sparkling water. You’ll save plenty, and add a lot of nutrients.

Stock the pantry

A well-stocked pantry lets you cook on the nights there is no time to stop at the store. Organic, gluten-free pasta and a jar of healthy marinara sauce can turn a pound of ground beef into dinner in minutes. Canned beans can stand in for dried beans, when there is no time to soak and cook. And canned tomatoes, wild tuna or canned salmon, rice, and lentils stretch a meal further.

Keep olive oil, real butter, real maple syrup, a bag of lemons, and a handful of assorted dried herbs and spices like oregano, basil, thyme, garlic, onion powder, cumin, salt, and pepper, in the pantry, so you can season anything without a packet of processed flavoring. A squeeze of lemon and a pat of butter over cooked frozen vegetables will often get a hungry kid to eat them without a fight.

Read the label

The reason junk food costs so much for so little is what goes into it. If you read the label you’ll find seed oils, added sugar, chemical preservatives, fillers, and petroleum dyes—most of it there to stretch shelf life, drive cravings, or color the food. Those ingredients are not there for nutrition.

Oats and wheat are sprayed with glyphosate, a probable carcinogen, and it turns up in nearly every oat cereal, granola, and snack bar aimed at kids and adults who believe these are healthy options. Processed food snacks are full of chemicals, and empty of anything beneficial. The simplest rule at the store is this: Avoid seed oils, fillers, dyes, and long ingredient lists. If the label reads like a chemistry set, put it back. Buy food with ONE ingredient when possible.

This is what MAHA looks like at the kitchen table. It is a family choosing real food over the seed oils, dyes, and hidden sugars that fill the grocery store, and discovering that real food was the better choice all along. It takes a plan, a list, and some new habits, but the payoff shows up at the register and in your family’s health.

It also brings the family back into the kitchen, cooking together, where children learn early that real food is worth the effort. As Secretary Kennedy says at the close of every episode of his YouTube series, “America, it’s time to eat real food. Let’s get cooking!”

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Given the multi-millions of dollars of fraud uncovered by DOGE, HHS and others over the past year-and-a-half, one could reasonably argue that Thorsen is just a sideshow, a minor player in a drama with a cast of thousands.

But Thorsen, who avoided United States authority’s moves to extradite him for over fourteen years while living in Denmark, deserves top billing. He’s much more than a minor thief.

In the early 2000’s, Thorsen scammed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by manipulating Danish health data in a broad scheme to conceal the link between autism and vaccines. His research, cited repeatedly, was pivotal in shaping public perception that vaccines absolutely cannot and do not cause autism.

While it remains to be seen what additional shoes will drop after Tuesday’s expected ‘guilty’ plea, many of the facts of Thorsen’s law breaking are emerging – and troubling.

Let’s start with Thorsen’s romantic relationship with his CDC supervisor, Diana Schendel. On May 14, 2009, epidemiologist Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, to whom Schendel reported at the CDC, sent her a reprimand.

“It was noted,” Yeargin-Allsopp writes in an email, “that information of a sensitive budgetary programmatic nature was shared by you with the grantee (Dr. Thorsen). In addition, intense advocacy to the point of impartiality and a lack of objectivity on your part for the Denmark project has been witnessed by others and reported to your immediate supervisor . . . .”

People at the CDC knew that Schendel was in a relationship with Thorsen for years. As Yeargin-Allsop notes in her letter, it was “witnessed by others and reported to supervisors.”

Emails between Schendel and Thorsen, dating back to 2004 and republished by Children’s Health Defense, confirm what colleagues saw. “Dearest Love,” writes Schendel in one, from 2007. “It’s a bright and sunny day and I’m trying to avoid any stressful work . . .”

However, Yeargin-Allsop’s reprimand wasn’t just about an inappropriate relationship. People at the CDC working around Schendel had other concerns. It appears that she was involved, to some extent, in Thorsen’s financial fraud. Why did they say and do nothing?

The reprimand should be considered in the timeline that author James Grundvig exposes in Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC, the 2015 book on Thorsen and the CDC.

Grundvig tells us that Thorsen started a research organization called North Atlantic Neuro-Epidemiological Alliance (NANEA), which he ran out of Aarhus University in Denmark, where he was a professor. Starting around 2000, Thorsen brought CDC grant money into Aarhus and, for a while, everyone involved was happy.

While running NANEA, Thorsen made sure his researchers produced the papers that the CDC needed to exonerate vaccines as a cause in the autism epidemic.

Thorsen also used NANEA as a vehicle to fuel his extravagant lifestyle. He threw lavish, boozy parties in Denmark.

We tend to think of scientists and researchers as quiet, introspective people wearing white lab coats and running experiments.

That wasn’t Poul Thorsen. He was a lothario and a party animal.

What kind of scientist was he? According to Grundvig, Thorsen had a poor work ethic and was an incompetent scientist.

One fellow researcher reported Thorsen to Aarhus but nothing was done.

The money flowed. The booze flowed.

His relationship with Schendel continued. And then the wheels came flying off.

Aarhus noticed financial irregularities and discovered Thorsen was double-dipping by also, allegedly, working as a full-time professor at Emory the elite, private university in Atlanta.

After terminating his contract, Aarhus issued a statement distancing itself from Thorsen, making it clear that he no longer had any relationship with the university.

What was Thorsen thinking? Two full-time professorships at two different universities separated by the Atlantic Ocean; running NANEA; and managing CDC grants?

Getting a professorship at Emory, which has close ties to nearby CDC headquarters, is no cakewalk. It’s a prestigious gig, winnable for someone either with a stellar record or the right connections. Since Thorsen lacked the former, it’s fair to assume the latter came into play. But that someone was likely not a mid-level CDC grant supervisor like Schendel. It had to have been done by someone with stature and influence.

Did someone at the CDC also help Thorsen in his double-dipping scheme? Was the Emory gig part of a covert payment for the research Thorsen carried out that so perfectly ‘confirmed’ no causal link between vaccines and autism?

Aarhus, which was under financial stress at the time, reported Thorsen’s activities to Danish law enforcement. In the U.S., authorities found that Thorsen was skimming money into his CDC Credit Union accounts.

Thorsen was criminally charged in Denmark for not paying taxes on the money he had taken from the CDC grant. Although those charges did not result in a conviction, they caught the attention of CDC officials. In April 2011, those officials finally indicted Thorsen on 22 counts of wire fraud.

So why the delay in reeling Thorsen in to justice in the U.S.? Did the CDC turn a blind eye to Thorsen’s case?

Could it have been because they needed Thorsen’s access to Danish health data, to get them out of the legal difficulties posed by families filing lawsuits alleging that the vaccines CDC recommended caused their children’s autism?

Thorsen pitched a solution to a crisis that vaccine manufacturers, the CDC and other public health organizations faced in the early 2000’s: legions of families reported that their children had regressed into autism after receiving childhood vaccines. They filed lawsuits in ‘vaccine court’ against the federal government. If the government lost and the vaccine trust fund was wiped out, the biggest pharma companies, including Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi-Pasteur, Glaxo-Smith Kline, and Eli Lilly, would be on the hook for billions.

For Big Pharma, Thorsen was a white knight on a stead, carrying a solution. So argues Kevin Barry, author of Vaccine Whistleblower: Exposing Autism Research Fraud at the CDC. As he explains, the CDC “was desperate to absolve vaccines as a cause for the increase in autism.”

According to Lyn Redwood, former president of Children’s Health Defense, a secret meeting among members of the public health and vaccinology communities took place in Simpsonwood, Georgia. She believes the reason for the meeting was for attendees to devise a plan to underplay research showing an alarming association between thimerosal and autism.

CDC was indeed desperate. Epidemiological research conducted by a Belgian scientist, Thomas Verstraeten, revealed an astonishing association between thimerosal and autism and other neurological disorders.

Thorsen proposed using Danish health and vaccination data to get CDC and their vaccine company partners out of the jam that Verstraeten’s research uncovered in U.S. health data.

In its break-neck race to exonerate vaccines as a cause for autism, CDC needed data from outside the U.S. As a Dane, Thorsen had access to such data, the Danish health data that no American scientist could get. He pitched a plan for the CDC to use it.

The rest is history.

Scientist Brian Hooker, co-author, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, has called for the retraction of Thorsen’s research – not because of his criminal activities – but because the research is flawed.

“With thimerosal, Thorsen used different inclusion criteria from year to year to create the illusion that autism rates were going up after thimerosal was removed (from Danish vaccines). Indeed, the rates went down, not up,” Hooker writes.

Regarding the MMR vaccine and autism, Hooker adds, “Thorsen merely fudged numbers in the right direction to abolish the relationship between the MMR and autism.”

Hooker also addressed Thorsen’s financial crimes. “There’s no way in hell that others at the CDC didn’t know exactly what he was doing,” Hooker writes.

Hooker is 100% correct.

Yours truly was responsible for managing federal criminal justice grant money when I worked in a county government back in 2000. The federal supervisors I reported to were top-notch. They emphasized that money was to be spent on approved business and every dime was accounted for. They were readily available to answer questions and were always helpful. Reports were submitted regularly and reviewed thoroughly.

Contrast this to what happened at the CDC. Thorsen bought a car, motorcycles, and a house and, somehow, no one sounded the alarm.

How was that even possible?

CDC has a chain of command, like many federal agencies. The people who also should have caught on were copied on a Yeargin-Allsopp email to Jose Codero – Catherine Murphy, Coleen Boyle, and Yeargin-Allsopp herself – all in the CDC leadership chain.

These people could have known and, indeed, should have known that Thorsen went on a blitzkrieg spending spree and diverted CDC research dollars into his own pocket. The Yeargin-Allsopp letter of reprimand to Schendel indicates that a lot of people at CDC knew what was going on and reported it.

At some point, someone in authority at CDC should have called Schendel in and asked, “What do you know about your lover’s financial affairs? Where is all the money going?”

But no one at CDC acted and by the time CDC administrators did, the damage was done and Thorsen flew the coop to Denmark.

There’s ample evidence to suggest Thorsen saved the CDC’s vaccine program and vaccine manufacturers billions of dollars.

CDC had the research – if one could call it that – needed to deny the link between vaccines and autism. The families who filed claims in the vaccine court saw their children’s cases dismissed.

While a fugitive, Thorsen lived comfortably in Denmark, without a care in the world. He never looked back at the wreckage he left behind. Vaccine promoters like Paul Offit still cite Thorsen’s papers as proof that vaccines do not cause autism.

To this day, the media repeats, endlessly, that vaccines do not cause autism, never realizing that the claim is built on flawed research produced by a criminal, now in custody, under the stewardship of a corrupt cabal of government apparatchiks.

James Grundvig describes Thorsen in his book as a master manipulator. Grundvig is spot on – as he is on the fact that Thorsen could not have acted alone.

Thorsen is more than a thief. It takes a certain kind of depravity to live the high life while fabricating science to conceal irreparable harm to innocent children and ensure that more children will be harmed.

For two decades, Thorsen’s fraudulent studies helped federal public health authorities shut down anything other than genetic research into autism causality.

In the 20+ years that have passed since Thorsen partied his ass off and flimflammed his way to infamy, millions of children have been diagnosed with autism. And, until recently, the government agency responsible for protecting the health of Americans has never probed why.

That is Thorsen’s real crime.

And, as further investigation will reveal, he did not act alone.

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The proposed legislation is nearly identical to HR5075, introduced by Greg Steube (R-FL) in the House of Representatives on August 29, 2025, also as the GRACE Act. It, too, requires public schools to grant religious exemptions to families that request them.

Under the Act, K-12 schools that refuse to grant vaccine exemptions for students on the basis of their religion will not receive educational funding from the government.

Moreover, the Act stipulates that schools would be barred from requiring students to provide documentation to prove the sincerity of their religious beliefs – and would be free to wear religious clothing, pray, or opt out from lessons should they feel they conflict with their religion.

The Senate and House, currently on hiatus, are expected to vote on the proposed legislation in the fall.

More than 50 organizations nationwide have already endorsed the bills – and the MAHA movement has, too, for it aligns neatly with a principle fundamental to MAHA: that neither the government nor schools should make medical and health decisions for children. Their parents should.

The Trump administration has also signaled its support for religious liberties in a recent executive order, which calls to ‘maximize’ parental choice over childhood vaccines, and specifically instructs federal agencies to ensure states are compliant with “their obligations to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”

While only four states – New York, California, Connecticut and Maine – do not allow religious (or philosophical) exemptions to school vaccine mandates, it’s an issue that has long deserved to be tackled at the federal level. America needs federally mandated religious protections against precisely the kind of vaccine mandates foisted on the country during the Covid pandemic.

Just one month before lockdowns, advocates for religious liberty had been lobbying for constitutional protections for American parents. A letter to President Donald Trump, dated February 3, 2020, commissioned by Freedom of Religion-United Solutions (FOR-US) and presented by the International Religious Freedom Roundtable, garnered over 39,000 signatures. The letter called attention to the campaign to pressure state legislatures to repeal laws allowing religious or philosophical exemptions to vaccination.

The CDC, FDA and state agencies, it said, lacked the science to support their recommended vaccination schedules and were essentially using “police power” to force these vaccines on children.

“The religious exemption repeal bills which have already passed, and those pending in 2020, demonstrate that state governments around the United States are committing a flagrant violation of U.S. citizens’ right to freedom of religion,” the letter read. “Informed consent cannot be present where there is state coercion.”

Many religions have some theological basis for refusing vaccinations, and the concern predates the controversial mRNA vaccines. Shannon Kroner, executive director of Freedom of Religion–United Solutions (FOR-US), has been uniting diverse faith traditions behind religious freedom for vaccine choice since 2019, including Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and others.

“It is clear that Americans want their religious freedoms honored and protected,” Kroner told The MAHA Report earlier this month “Our sincerely held convictions must be respected, and no family should be forced to choose between their faith and their child’s education or participation in school.”

Kroner and FOR-US support the GRACE Act, saying it reaffirms that the government “must not compel citizens to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

For a large swath of people of faith, the issue of vaccines is tied to Biblical teaching about caring for children and avoiding injury. In a recent interview with Kroner that can be watched on Rumble, Rabbi Pinchas Yehuda Levin referenced the teaching of Orthodox Jewish scholars:

“Many great Torah scholars said, by definition, every vaccine is a biblical sin, because the vaccine violates God’s commandment that we guard our health,” Levin said. “It’s very explicit. You just take out the insert to the vaccine, you’ll see a vaccine is dangerous to our health and that’s why there is [a] religious exemption. We cannot be forced to take something that is detrimental to our health.”

The issues of informed consent and religious freedom have never been more important, and the Covid-19 ordeal demonstrates why. MRNA vaccines were never safe or effective for healthy young children. This reality was always clear, yet the medical establishment obfuscated and outright lied about it.

“Religious liberty is not a partisan issue,” Kroner said. “It is a foundational American right that protects people of every faith and of no faith at all. When we defend the right of families to live according to their sincerely held beliefs, we strengthen the fabric of our entire nation.”

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“Every school meal should make a child healthier,” said Kennedy during a press conference in the U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are putting the updated Dietary Guidelines into action by bringing real, nutrient-dense food back to school cafeterias and giving schools the tools to serve it affordably. Together with Secretary Rollins, we are building a school food system that supports American farmers and raises healthier American children.”

The initiative includes $50 million in new cafeteria infrastructure funding, on top of $20 million in previously announced equipment grants; up to $25 million in additional Patrick Leahy Farm to School grants for fiscal year 2026; greater promotion of USDA’s Local Option procurement pathway; and $30 million from HHS for school-meal nutrition research.

Rollins acknowledged that decades of changes in school food preparation have left some cafeterias without even the basic infrastructure needed to cook. “A lot of you have heard that many of our school cafeterias no longer have ovens,” she said, “They no longer actually cook the food.”

Kennedy was equally explicit about the goal. “We need to expand scratch cooking, reduce added sugars and ultra-processed food, serve more fresh produce, whole grains, and high-quality protein,” he said.

I’ve seen firsthand how differently children respond when food becomes something they can touch, grow, smell, and help prepare. Harvest to Hallways is worth paying attention to. This is not just another directive telling schools to serve healthier meals. It begins by addressing the practical reasons many schools struggle to do so in the first place: kitchens built for reheating rather than cooking real local food.

The Problem Isn’t Simply Nutrition Standards

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act successfully raised the bar for nutrition standards in American school meals. But it largely regulated the meal’s composition rather than rebuilding the system used to produce it. Almost 16 years later, Harvest to Hallways is taking aim at that missing piece by investing in kitchens, local supply chains, and farm-to-school relationships that could enable schools to meet nutritional goals by preparing more food on site from real, wholesome ingredients.

USDA research found that schools relied on processed foods produced by companies such as Tyson, General Mills, Kraft Heinz, and Rich Product Corporation who is the leading supplier of USDA-approved frozen doughs and pre-baked pizza that are designed specifically for school cafeterias for more than half of the protein, grain, sauce, and dressing items served.. These foods are then brought to schools by large distributors such as Sysco and Performance Food Group Company.

In practice, for many schools this means purchasing foods that arrive already cooked or partially prepared rather than making them from basic ingredients in the school kitchen. Schools currently report difficulties expanding from scratch cooking due to multiple factors, including insufficient staff and preparation time and a lack of culinary training, kitchen space, and equipment needed to prepare more meals from whole ingredients.

A Complicated Federal Funding Picture

There is also an important piece of recent history missing from the Harvest to Hallways announcement.

The new investment comes less than a year and a half after USDA canceled a substantially larger local-food purchasing initiative. In March 2025, the department ended a planned second round of the Local Food for Schools and Child Care Cooperative Agreement Program, or LFSCC, which was expected to provide approximately $660 million to states, territories, and Tribal governments to purchase food from local and regional producers. USDA also canceled additional funding for a related local-food program serving food banks and other community organizations; together, the cuts exceeded $1 billion.

Harvest to Hallways is not a direct replacement. Its $50 million investment in kitchen infrastructure addresses an important barrier that purchasing dollars alone cannot solve.

But the scale and structure are different.

LFSCC gave states and local food systems purchasing power specifically to buy from regional producers. Harvest to Hallways relies more heavily on grants, infrastructure investments, and existing procurement. And USDA had already opened the FY2026 Farm to School grant competition in September 2025, with applications closing on December 5. At the time, the agency advertised up to $18 million in available funding. That means the newly announced funding expands an existing FY2026 grant cycle rather than launching an entirely new application process.

There is a broader procurement question as well. Schools can use USDA Foods entitlement dollars to obtain produce through the USDA Department of Defense Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, a longstanding partnership in which the Defense Logistics Agency contracts with produce vendors and helps aggregate purchasing across school systems.

That scale can provide dependable distribution, food-safety guardrails and competitive pricing. But efficient institutional purchasing is not necessarily the same as building a decentralized local food system. Large contracts can make supplying thousands of cafeterias practical, while remaining difficult for a small nearby farmer to participate.

Harvest to Hallways acknowledges the complexity of our current system. The administration is arguing that healthier food does not always have to cost more while simultaneously investing millions in the capacity schools need to prepare it.

If the goal is truly farm-to-school, Rollins and Kennedy would do well to measure success not only by how much American-grown food schools purchase, but also by how many more American farmers are actually able to sell that food.

What Farm to School Looks Like on the Ground

USDA’s existing Farm to School grants provide a preview of what is possible.

In northwest Tennessee, the Northwest Tennessee Local Food Network received $500,000 for a two-year project spanning 12 schools in five districts and nearly 6,700 students. Rather than simply paying schools to purchase vegetables, the program is placing C.H.E.F. (Children’s Health through Education and Food) ambassadors in schools to train cafeteria staff, develop culinary skills, and help employees work with fresh local ingredients. Students will encounter those foods through cooking labs and taste tests before seeing them on cafeteria lines.

“We’ve learned that one of the most effective ways to impact children’s knowledge about health is through interactive activities like cooking labs,” co-director Samantha Smith Goyret said in an interview.

In Utah, a $350,000 grant will place Utah-grown fruit in 13 child nutrition programs while helping growers navigate school procurement, plant school orchards, and integrate agriculture and nutrition into classrooms.

The two-year project is intended to produce a model that can be replicated statewide. In Key West, Florida, where geography creates a unique local food challenge, the Star of the Sea Foundation received $103,375 for its Smart Sprouts project. The Florida Keys’ 120-mile island chain has few farms, so the program brings agriculture to children through classrooms, cafeterias, summer programs, and hands-on growing experiences rather than pretending every community has the same agricultural resources.

And in rural Indiana, Perry Central Community School Corporation received $286,351 to expand Perry Central Organics, its student-run hydroponic operation. What started with a single small growing tower is expected to expand to 14 vertical hydroponic towers producing lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables for approximately 1,200 students.

Students are already growing lettuce just steps from the cafeteria, managing orders, and learning production and business skills.

“We kept thinking, ‘How do we make this bigger and better?’” Agriculture teacher Carrie Guillaume recently said in an interview. “So, we just went for it.”

Building the Missing Middle

Other grants address a less visible problem: getting food from farms into institutional kitchens.

In Maine, Healthy Communities of the Capital Area received $465,270 to strengthen the Maine Farm & Sea to School Network. Its project focuses on market infrastructure that connects child nutrition programs not only with farmers but also with fishers, processors, and food businesses, along with training, technical assistance, and producer-buyer connections.

In Arkansas, WSBZ Farms is working across all 11 Bryant Public Schools to integrate Arkansas-grown specialty crops into school menus while creating stronger markets for growers. That work builds on WSBZ’s broader efforts to develop a regional supply chain connecting small farmers with schools and other institutional buyers.

The Pennsylvania Beef Council, meanwhile, is scaling an existing farm-to-school model that connects cattle producers, processors, and distributors directly with schools. Its PA Beef to PA Schools program has already built relationships with more than 140 schools; USDA funding will support sourcing assistance, recipes, menu development, and agricultural education as the program expands statewide.

During their joint press conference on Monday, USDA and HHS also highlighted the Mississippi Community Housing Development Organization in Vicksburg, which operates community gardens that serve K–12 students and other local residents. In 2024, the nonprofit received a $320,006 USDA grant to develop a sustainable agricultural hub in the Mississippi Delta – an example of the broader Harvest to Hallways goal of strengthening local food production so schools have more reliable access to nearby, fresh food.

Taken together, these projects show the potential for Harvest to Hallways.

The real intervention in all of these programs is a functioning food system: skilled cooks, well-equipped kitchens, farmers with viable school markets, processors and distributors that can move local food efficiently, students willing to try unfamiliar foods, and education that helps children understand how food is grown, prepared, and connected to their health.

Building Health from the Cafeteria Up

HHS’s new $30 million research investment is an opportunity to measure whether these programs create lasting change. Will schools cook more meals from whole ingredients years from now? Are children more willing to eat those foods because they helped grow, prepare, or understand them? Are farmers gaining reliable new markets? And are communities building food systems strong enough to continue after the grant dollars are gone?

That is where Harvest to Hallways could become much more than another school nutrition initiative. MAHA has consistently argued that better health begins upstream, before chronic disease, before prescriptions, and before unhealthy patterns become entrenched. School food is one of the most impactful places to start.

If these investments succeed, the payoff will not only be measured in better school lunches. It will be in the children themselves, who grow up knowing what real food looks like, where it comes from, and how it affects their health; school kitchens once again will be equipped to cook; and farmers will be more deeply connected to the communities they feed.

With a focus on making the next generation healthier than the last, there may be few better places to start than the school cafeteria.

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Applause filled the arena as Kennedy took the stage and shook Trump’s hand.

Kennedy had run an “extraordinary campaign,” said Trump, adding that if he’d been allowed to enter the Democratic primary, he “would have easily beaten Joe Biden.”

Continued Trump, “His candidacy has inspired millions and millions of Americans, raised critical issues that have been too long ignored in this country and brought together people from across the political spectrum in a positive campaign grounded in the American values of his father, Robert Kennedy and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.”

Trump added that RFK Jr.’s father and uncle were surely proud of him – and so was he.

“Bobby, Bobby, Bobby!” the crowd chanted.

Before handing the microphone to Kennedy, Trump promised two things: that he would form a new presidential commission on assassination attempts that would be tasked with releasing all remaining documents related to the assassination of Kennedy’s uncle, JFK; and that he would also establish a panel of experts to study what is causing the increase in chronic illness and childhood diseases, including autism and obesity.

Kennedy had held a press conference that afternoon announcing he was suspending his campaign for the presidency, saying the Democratic Party had run a “sham primary” and subverted the will of voters by blocking him from the ballot in state after state. He’d also called out the media, saying the DNC had been aided by the television networks, which had “exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs.”

On stage in Glendale, Kennedy told the story of how he and Trump had come to a meeting of the minds.

Kennedy said that after the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the month before, he got a call from Calley Means, asking if he would talk to Trump.

“I said ‘of course,’” Kennedy said.

“We had a very good talk, and then he invited me to come see him the next day,” said Kennedy. “And I went to Minneapolis and saw him. We met again a couple of weeks later in Florida. And we talked about – not about the things that separate us, because we don’t agree on everything – but on the values and the issues that bind us together.”

He said they’d agreed on the importance for the country of safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic.

“Don’t you want healthy children?” Kennedy asked. The audience gave its answer with a huge applause.

“And don’t you want the chemicals out of our food?” The answer again was applause.

“And don’t you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption?” asked Kennedy. “And that’s what President Trump told me that he wanted.”

That fall in New York City, at the Alfred E. Smith Foundation Dinner in October, Trump said that after winning the election he was going to let Kennedy “go wild” on health.

On Nov. 14, after Trump did win the election, he announced he was nominating Kennedy to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the gargantuan public health agency that Kennedy had famously exposed as “captured” by the pharmaceutical industry in his best-selling book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.

It was an incredible turn of events, and something that few Kennedy supporters could have envisioned at the start of 2024.

Kennedy was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Feb. 13, 2025, and immediately took the helm of HHS.

Now, a year and a half later, American health is on a new trajectory: Kennedy has flipped the food pyramid and launched a massive “Eat Real Food” campaign that prioritizes proteins, healthy fats, dairy, fruits, and vegetables; states have banned candy and soda from SNAP; 27 of the largest American food companies have pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products; hospitals, schools and military bases across the country have agreed to serve more nutritious food; and some big Pharma companies have lowered the price of their drugs.

In addition, all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee have been replaced by people who care about making sure vaccines are safe; and media darling, Anthony Fauci, is on the ropes as HHS provides the Senate with internal emails, text messages and other documents to uncover the true origins of the Covid pandemic, which killed 7 million people worldwide.

For this and much more, millions of us are cheering.

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[Republished with permission from co-author, Jeffrey D. Sachs; this article originally appeared on August 15 on the independent news website, Common Dreams.]

On July 29, Anthony Fauci sat before a Senate committee under subpoena and declined to answer questions more than one hundred times. In some two hundred and fifty prior appearances before Congress he had never once invoked the Fifth Amendment. He invoked it on the question of where the worst pandemic in a century began, and on all other questions.

He was entitled to do so. The Fifth is a right, and anyone who treats silence as proof of guilt misunderstands the Constitution. But this misses the larger point. Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for thirty-eight years, becoming the face of the US medical science establishment (once referring to himself as such: “I am The Science”) and it was his agency among others that funded coronavirus research in Wuhan and in North Carolina. When the question is: How did a million Americans die? then the man who played the role of “America’s Doctor” does not get to stay silent and retain the mantle of science.

Four years ago, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we called for an independent inquiry into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the pandemic, with full access to American as well as relevant Chinese records. The public was told from the very start of the pandemic that the origin issue was settled, that the virus was natural. But the issue most certainly was not settled, and every FOIA release, every whistleblower account, every Congressional document produced since 2022 has cast more doubt on this narrative and pointed instead toward a laboratory origin of the virus.

In January 2025 the Central Intelligence Agency finally aligned with that judgment, assessing “with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin.” The FBI reached the same conclusion with moderate confidence. So did the Department of Energy, which runs the national laboratories. Three American agencies and the German BND now favor a research-related origin. Yet that judgement has still not been evaluated in the light of all of the relevant American records bearing on the issue.

We do, however, now know clearly how such a virus may have been made, because the recipe was written down. In 2018 Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology submitted a proposal to DARPA called DEFUSE. It set out a specific plan: use Baric’s reverse-genetics platform—the technology he built and patented for assembling coronaviruses from synthetic fragments—to construct bat sarbecovirus backbones, including consensus sequences assembled from field samples, and then insert a protease site at the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein.

A protease site is essential in order for these bat viruses to jump the “species barrier” between bats and humans, and in this case is called a furin cleavage site (FCS). When it first appeared, SARS-CoV-2 was the only known virus of its family (the clade of Sarbecoviruses) to carry such a site. It remains unique in this respect. Despite much sampling of viruses from the bats that serve as the reservoir species for these viruses, no other virus in this clade or family has appeared that displays the FCS, just as no animal has been found in China that was infected with a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. These findings continue to cause great concern.

This novel FCS was the feature that most alarmed the virologists who first read the genome as it represents an evolutionary leap with no evidence that this had taken place in nature. Unknown to most, American scientists had proposed to build exactly this feature into precisely that kind of coronavirus, only two years before the outbreak of a novel coronaviral disease in Wuhan. Given the availability of a suitable template virus, the insertion of twelve nucleotides to form the FCS would be trivial and similar work had already been performed.

Now consider what was said behind closed doors. On January 31, 2020, leading virologists told Fauci that the genome looked engineered. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust convened them the next day, and the day after sent Fauci and Francis Collins a tally of where they stood. Michael Farzan, who discovered the receptor used by SARS -CoV 1 and 2 to enter human cells, put the odds at sixty-forty or seventy-thirty for a laboratory accident. Edward Holmes stood at sixty-forty on the laboratory side. Farrar wrote that on a scale where zero is nature and one hundred is release, he was honestly at fifty.

None of this was disclosed. Six weeks later, five of those scientists published “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine, concluding that no laboratory scenario was plausible. Fauci promoted it from the White House podium as independent and definitive science. In a message released only this June, Collins told colleagues that the paper was work that he, Fauci, Farrar and Lawrence Tabak had “helped with but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly.”

The arguments laid out in the paper were always scientifically weak, and have since collapsed, one by one. The authors said that building such a virus in a lab would be hard, yet a German team assembled one from synthetic fragments in under two weeks using a yeast-based system. The Proximal Origin experts said that a molecular feature adjacent to the furin cleavage site showed the virus had been shaped inside a living organism rather than in a laboratory. This feature (a group of sugars known as O-glycans) was predicted by the authors’ computer analyses—yet laboratory work showed that this feature did not actually exist. They also stated that a lab designer would have optimized the virus’s grip on the human receptor via its Spike protein, yet Ralph Baric had already run an experiment showing that infection of human cells proceeds better if Spike protein binding to the receptor site is less than optimal. No correction to any of these errors in Proximal Origin has ever been published. The authors soon lost conviction in their own conclusions, as revealed in their own emails and Slack messages, yet they did not retract.

Baric himself was involved in the genesis of Proximal Origin, since he was on the February 1 call, in secret. His presence was disclosed to no one, he cannot explain how he got there, and at least two participants did not know he was there. Baric did not mention the DEFUSE proposal on the call, and has since claimed to have forgotten about it. The proposal sat in the files of the Pentagon and the intelligence community for eighteen months after the outbreak began, and no agency produced it; it surfaced through a whistleblower. When it did, the authors of Proximal Origin privately agreed they needed to “re-convince themselves that the resemblance was coincidence”—and one suggested they stay off email or carefully curate some emails for the freedom-of-information record. Baric has provided testimony, some of which has remained classified, presumably because of his links to the intelligence community.

A number of intelligence agencies (including the German BND and the CIA) favor a research-related origin and these agencies point toward a laboratory accident in Wuhan. If this were the case, it would not explain the need for such an elaborate coverup involving high level US government personnel and scientists from the UK, Australia and other countries. Scientists around the world are much more convinced of the existence of a coverup than they are of a natural origin of the virus, but relatively few have stated their views in public.

If the virus was indeed grown, engineered or reassembled in a lab, some of the technology used was American, the design was American, and some of the funding was American—and so are some of the records that would settle the matter: Baric’s notebooks, freezer inventories, the sequences of viruses sampled by EcoHealth Alliance, records held at UC Davis for the PREDICT program under USAID, transfer agreements and shipping receipts between UNC and other US federal laboratories; as well as the NIH grant files showing whether the work proposed in DEFUSE but rejected by DARPA was funded in pieces by other US agencies. Every item could be produced by order of Congress this week. All have been withheld for six years.

Our charge is not that there was American involvement in the appearance of this virus. Our charge is that Fauci and other US officials and scientists have blocked the search for the truth. No inquiry can determine the truth based on the evidence at hand. So, open up the files. Convene an independent inquiry with subpoena power, insulated from the agencies whose own conduct is in question, and let the evidence fall where it falls. If it exonerates Ralph Baric and Anthony Fauci, as it may, they will have been cleared by evidence rather than by assertion—the only kind of exoneration worth having.

That is what Fauci should have said on July 29: “Here are my records. Here are NIH records. Compel the rest, and I will help you get the answer.”

He instead invoked the Fifth, more than 100 times.

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An interview on this topic with Judge Napolitano on July 31, 2026 is on Jeff Sachs YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JeffreyDSachsOfficial

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth introduced the program in a video captioned “The High-T Department of War,” saying the screening is “about restoring and optimizing natural capabilities, protecting longevity, and ensuring the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”

Younger service members may request screening as well. Anyone found deficient may elect testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), a choice Hegseth leaves to each individual.

The conventional view

Upon learning about the required screening, conventional health experts were skeptical. Reuters questioned six experts about whether the screening would improve readiness, and five worried it could lead to unnecessary or harmful treatment.

It is true that supplemental testosterone lowers a man’s sperm count, affecting fertility.

“Many in our armed forces are young men who are not done having their families,” said Dr. Kevin McVary, a urologist who serves on the medical advisory board of the telehealth platform, Rugiet. “If you just dole out the testosterone, the testes will shrink.”

The American Urological Association (AUA) and the Endocrine Society advise treatment only for men with confirmed deficiency plus symptoms, a standard built to treat established disease rather than to restore function. The AUA estimates up to a third of men on TRT fall short of those criteria.

A decline that starts before enlistment

Hegseth built the policy around age, which is why the testing starts at 30. The problem is that a man in his twenties today already has less testosterone than a man his age had in 1999. He shows up to the recruiting office already low, and no one checks for another 10 years.

Testosterone levels in a healthy man between 19 and 39 typically run between 264 and 916 nanograms per deciliter, and the AUA sets the threshold for deficiency at 300. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data on 4,045 men aged 15 to 39 shows mean total testosterone falling from 605 nanograms per deciliter in 1999 to 451 by 2016. That drop held in men of normal body weight, even after accounting for age, race, activity, smoking and alcohol.

Normal is not the same as optimal. Reference ranges come from the existing population, so as testosterone falls across a generation, the definition of normal falls with it. A 25-year-old who is told his level of 320 is fine clears the threshold for disease but doesn’t have the hormone profile of a healthy young man.

Nothing in human genetics explains a 25% drop in 16 years, but the environment does. Toxins in the food, the water and the packaging now affect military readiness as much as training does. Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates, both used in food packaging, suppress the pituitary signal that tells the testes to produce testosterone.

Atrazine and glyphosate, among the most heavily applied herbicides in agriculture, damage testicular tissue and interfere with testosterone synthesis. A 2024 study found microplastic particles in every human testicle examined. Those exposures reach a young man decades before a recruiter does, which puts the real cause of the problem outside the Pentagon’s reach .

What testosterone does under load

Testosterone does more than build muscles. A 1996 study found that healthy men given testosterone gained muscle size and strength with or without exercise. A follow-up study in men 18 to 35 showed that as testosterone rose, so did lean mass, muscle size, strength and power, while body fat decreased.

Testosterone also acts on dopamine pathways that determine motivation and effort. Athletes given testosterone before a physical stressor reported feeling calmer and more confident under strain.

The high physical and mental demands of military training, along with a caloric deficit, can drastically lower a man’s testosterone. Eight weeks of the Army’s most demanding course drives levels down to the range of a castrated man, and it takes roughly six weeks to recover. However, when the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine put men through 28 days of hard training, the group given testosterone gained muscle while the control group had no gains.

What measuring can and cannot do

Last year, on December 10, Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, the Harvard urologist who pioneered modern testosterone therapy, spoke at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Expert Panel on Testosterone Replacement Therapy for Men. Low levels warrant treatment whether or not symptoms appear, he argued. “You could make a very strong argument that having a normal testosterone level is important for health and prevention of illness,” he said.

TRAVERSE, the largest cardiovascular trial ever run on testosterone therapy, followed more than 5,200 men and found no increase in cardiovascular events among men treated with testosterone compared to placebo. The FDA has since removed its black box warning on testosterone.

Hegseth’s order treats men 30 and older, and it is worth doing. But supplementing a 35-year-old sergeant does nothing for the teenager who will one day replace him, the one absorbing the same plastics and pesticides now and likely to enlist with even less than the sergeant started with. Screening and TRT manage the deficit without touching what created it.

Fixing that means going after the exposures that lower a young man’s testosterone long before he is old enough to enlist. It means getting endocrine-disrupting chemicals out of the food, the water, and the packaging–the BPA and phthalates and pesticide residues that suppress the hormonal signal at its source. It means feeding young men real food, including meat and animal fats, rather than the processed or plant-only diets that leave the body short of what it needs to make testosterone.

And it means encouraging both men and women to pick up weights, because few things support healthy testosterone and hormone balance as reliably as heavy, progressive strength training. This is the foundation the MAHA movement is built on, and it reaches the problem years before a testosterone test ever could.

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[The below Opinion piece was published on August 7, 2026 by The Epoch Times. Republished with permission from the author.]

A nation born in agronomy should never interfere with the rights of farmers to process and sell their own meat. New Hampshire is now presented with the opportunity to reinforce that right for the first time in a century.

Why is this even necessary? Restricting meat processing was an early intervention in commercial freedom. The year was 1906, the dawn of the Progressive Era. The new meat-processing industry was in trouble from bad press. Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” had become a best seller at a time when people were going wild for new books. The book caused profits to collapse and a huge return to traditional ways.

The new industry organized, facing a threat to its profits, to get the federal government to declare their products safe with new inspections. Added benefit: inspections were expensive so only the biggest players could afford them, hence squeezing out the little guys. Mainly, it was an attempt to subvert the instincts of the people. The cost: the rights of those who raise the animals to slaughter and process them were practically abolished.

It was a disastrous decision on many levels and has contributed heavily to the gradual but unrelenting decline of the family farm in this country. But at long last, one state is working to restore that freedom in light of rising prices for meat. It’s New Hampshire and the bill is HB 396. It passed both houses of Congress before it was vetoed by the governor following heavy lobbying by the meat-processing industry.

Now there is a chance for the veto to be overridden.

What Else Are They Hiding?

The bill seeks to allow limited on-farm or non-USDA-certified processing of cattle, swine, sheep, and goats for in-state sale. It permits the slaughter and process of 3 cattle, 5 swine, or 10 sheep/goats in a month. It insists on humane slaughter methods and carcasses to be refrigerated at or below 41°F within 12 hours.

The product must be clearly labeled. But then it can be sold directly from the farm, at farm stands or farmers’ markets, or to licensed restaurants and retailers (with record-keeping and menu/product labeling requirements). It’s not full freedom but it is a crucial step in the right direction. It could save many family farms, and promote health as well.

It addresses a serious crisis. In 1940 the United States had 6.9 million farms. Today there are only 1.9 million. The U.S. cattle herd is at its lowest level since 1951. U.S. farmers are faced with a meat-processing bottleneck, the result of 4 companies controlling 85 percent of U.S. beef and 67 percent of pork processing. Meanwhile, the U.S. imports 16–18 percent of the beef it consumes.

The bill permits farmers to circumvent slaughterhouse bottlenecks, and encourage farmers to increase their herds, reducing prices. It will allow consumers to choose where their meat comes from. It will improve profitability for livestock farmers. It will challenge the cartelization of meat processing that currently exists. It will breathe new life into custom slaughterhouses, most of which shut down in recent decades.

There is only one reason for the resistance to this common-sense reform: the power of big industry that wants to maintain its monopoly and keep prices high. In any legislative battle these days, the great challenge is to overcome such lobbying efforts and grant more freedom to the people.

The main challenge here from an economic standpoint is to allow the farmer to capture a greater share of the profit from making food. In 1970, 70 percent of what you paid for meat at the grocery store went to the rancher. In 2025, only about 30 percent got back to the rancher. The rest goes to Big Ag and Big Food, due to consolidation and monopolization in food industries.

This bill helps bust up the monopoly in at least one state. The need is reaching the desperation point. Big Ag owns ever more and the small farmer and rancher ever less. This is in major part due to restrictions on the ability to process meat on the farm itself. This government-induced monopoly imposes enormous costs that only Big Agriculture can afford.

​Keep in mind that on-site processing was the normal way of doing things for all of human history, including in American history. That changed with the growth of off-site meat processing in the late 19th century. There was nothing wrong with the idea. No one minds a new industrial innovation. The industry grew and grew, along with other industrial innovations at the time.

The problem came with growing sloppiness in the industry and the consumer revolt that ensued. Instead of just doing a better job, the dominant firms in the new industry came running to government for help. They lobbied for what became the Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Government promised to guarantee the quality of processed meat while restricting on-site processing. It never actually did that. In fact, after government inspectors took over, the meat became less safe due to primitive methods that farmers had long avoided. This time, sloppy methods and less safety came with a government guarantee of quality.

The single most urgent industrial reform we can take in this country is to reverse that unfortunate trend with one simple method: allow freedom like the Founding generation wanted.

This was at the very beginning of the so-called Progressive Era, which was not progress toward anything but industrial technocracy. The single most urgent industrial reform we can take in this country is to reverse that unfortunate trend with one simple method: allow freedom like the Founding generation wanted.

Overriding the governor’s veto would be a magnificent victory for the rights of owners and the thriving of farms in an area of the country where it is essential. It’s not enough but it is a step in the right direction. As it is, the wait times and travel costs of commercial processing are intolerable. This bill would encourage the flourishing of local meat raised and processed by our friends and neighbors, just like it used to be.

New Hampshire is the place for the revolution to begin. Of all state legislatures, it is the one that is most connected to the people. It has fully 400 members with Republicans in the majority. We need a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate to override, and can only get there with a bipartisan vote. Democrats who are not paid off by industry have every reason to support a veto as a strong statement of the rights of property and the will of the people.

Should the veto be overridden, it will be a moment of great celebration for food freedom and the restoration of local agriculture. It could also save the livelihoods of small farmers. It’s a beginning, not enough, but a good place to start.

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That senator is Kentucky’s Dr. Rand Paul, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In introducing Dr. Paul during the weekly MAHA Media Hub on Wednesday, MAHA Action president Tony Lyons referred to him as “our very own MAHA hero,” “a fighter for free speech” and a “warrior against corrupt science.” Lyons also praised him for his years-long mission to hold Fauci accountable for his actions.

“What he’s done with Fauci is such an epic moment,” Lyons said, “that we should celebrate because it was so hard to get here, because we had the most powerful health official in the world telling us lies every day.”

Sen. Paul’s fight to get to the truth about the origin of Covid-19 began six years ago when he was virtually alone among U.S. senators asking then NIAID director Fauci why he wasn’t talking about natural immunity, why he was urging that schools be closed when so few children had died from the virus or become seriously ill, and why he didn’t show more humility when it was clear that many of the early predictions about the new coronavirus had been wrong.

At a May 12, 2020 hearing where Fauci was testifying before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, then committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) said that testing and vaccines would be the key to re-opening the American economy.

It was Sen. Paul, a physician prior to being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, who turned the focus on something very different: Herd immunity.

The media, he told Fauci, was continuing to report that there was no evidence that patients who survived the new coronavirus had immunity.

“I think actually the truth is the opposite,” said Sen. Paul. “We have no evidence that survivors of coronavirus don’t have immunity, and a great deal of evidence that suggests that they do.”

Sen. Paul urged Fauci to clarify publicly what he’d told the committee – that in all likelihood, people recovering from Covid-19 did have natural immunity, and would not likely get the virus a second time.

At that hearing in the summer of 2020, Sen. Paul also pointedly questioned the public health advice to close schools, saying it made no sense to have a national strategy to close all schools, and that the power to make decisions about school closures should not come from Washington, and from a single person. He also warned of the effect of school closures on learning.

“If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home are not going to learn for a full year,” he said.

It’s remarkable to look back at this hearing and to see that so many things that Sen. Paul said early on turned out to be prescient.

In school districts across the country where schools remained closed or operated virtually for the 2020-2021 school year, many children fell behind in reading and math, with the learning loss so severe in cities like Indianapolis and Chicago that three years later, the gaps in academic performance were still significant.

In that hearing, Sen. Paul had also urged Fauci to take a more moderate stance on states re-opening, and was the only senator who seemed to recognize that the pandemic wasn’t nearly as deadly as Americans were being made to believe.

“In rural states, we never really reached any sort of pandemic levels in Kentucky and other states,” he told Fauci. “We have less deaths in Kentucky than we have in an average flu season. It’s not to say this isn’t deadly. But really outside of New England, we’ve had a relatively benign course for this virus nationwide.”

Bringing Fauci to Testify

Sen. Paul said he and the committee he chairs had negotiated for months to try to get information from Fauci.

“We’d get a slow trickle, and then it would come to an end,” he said. “He had agreed to come in voluntarily for a deposition, and then they went up until like the day before the agreement, and they said, ‘No, he’s not coming in.’ So, finally, we lost patience and we sent him a subpoena.”

Sen. Paul said he’s been able to get a great number of documents, including those that constitute Fauci’s diary, thanks to the cooperation of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others in the Trump administration who also want to get to the truth.

“There were two things from January of 2020 that we found out that he was thinking and saying, but was saying completely the opposite, really during the rest of the pandemic,” said Paul.

The first one was an e-mail exchange that Fauci had with a colleague where he wrote that he and other scientists were worried about the virus because it appeared to have been manipulated in a lab.

“So I do believe he knew it all along and suspected it from the very moment,” said Paul, “but then immediately in public, the same scientists who were saying in private that it looked manipulated, immediately came out and said in public – No, no it is implausible that could have come from the lab.”

Paul notes that Fauci also wrote in his diary that in January of 2020, he’d talked to his counterpart in China, George Gao, and Gao had told him that the earliest cases of people falling ill in Wuhan weren’t related to the wet market, where exotic animals are sold, yet Fauci had continued to insist publicly that the wet market was the likely origin of the virus.

“The reason this dishonesty is incredibly important is that if it came from the lab, he bears responsibility for having funded the lab,” said Paul.

Last week, Fauci pleaded the Fifth, refusing to answer any questions from any of the senators.

For that, he faces contempt of Congress.

Rand Paul is the son of former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, the de facto leader of the libertarian movement in America and a hero to many on the libertarian Right. He was raised in Texas, where his father worked as an obstetrician when not serving in office. He graduated from Baylor University in Texas and went on to the Duke University School of Medicine, earning his medical degree in 1988. Paul worked as an ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Kentucky, from 1993 until he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010, to replace Sen. Jim Bunning, who was retiring.

Throughout the pandemic Sen. Paul continued his pointed skepticism of public health authorities, focusing on the funding of gain-of-function research and its likely connection to the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

His pursuit of the truth about the nature of the virus and Fauci’s funding of gain-of-function research at the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, exploded at a July 20, 2021 hearing where Fauci denied that the research the NIH had funded was gain-of-function research and told Paul that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Sen. Paul reminded Fauci that it was a crime to lie to the U.S. Congress and Fauci – an unelected bureaucrat – burst out: “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you!”

Then CDC director Robert Redfield said later that he watched that hearing and was shocked when Fauci denied that the research he was funding – to manipulate a coronavirus to make it more pathogenic and more easily transmissible – was gain-of-function research.

Sen. Paul was unflappable in this hearing, and at the hearings that have followed, continuing his focused questioning of Fauci and other witnesses, never raising his voice and refusing to be deterred from the pursuit of the truth about Covid-19.

Who made it and where? And what was it?

At last week’s hearing, Sen. Paul told Fauci: “The decision to fund gain-of-function research In Wuhan, China, will likely go down as one of the worst public health decisions. Frankly, the American people deserve an apology.”

He asked Fauci to admit that the risks of this research had clearly exceeded any benefit, to apologize and ask forgiveness. It was true he hadn’t personally ordered every lockdown, said Paul, “...but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions. And you presented your recommendations not as judgements, open to debate, but as dictates of science itself.”

Continued Dr. Paul, “More than a million Americans died from COVID-19. Many of them died alone. Workers were forced to choose between a mandate and a job they needed. Businesses closed and never reopened. Children lost years of school they will never get back. Americans lost the freedom to work, to worship, and to decide what went into their own bodies. Nothing we do today can undo those losses. But silence does not honor them either. The American people deserve answers.”

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[The below was first published in The Baltimore Sun, here. Reprinted with permission from Armstrong Williams]

Few public officials have become as recognizable or as polarizing as Dr. Anthony Fauci.

For decades, he served as one of the nation’s leading public health officials, advising presidents of both parties through HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19 and other public health crises. During the pandemic, however, he became something far different: one of the most influential unelected officials in America. His recommendations shaped school closures, business shutdowns, travel restrictions, vaccine policies and countless aspects of daily life for hundreds of millions of Americans.

Those decisions carried enormous consequences.

Families lost businesses they had spent a lifetime building. Children lost valuable classroom instruction and social development. Churches closed their doors. Weddings were postponed. Funerals were held with only a handful of mourners. Workers were forced to choose between complying with mandates or losing their livelihoods. The economic, educational and emotional costs of the pandemic response are still being measured years later.

Against that backdrop, recent congressional testimony has renewed public interest in Fauci’s role during those extraordinary years.

Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during questioning in a Senate hearing. The Fifth Amendment is a cornerstone of the Constitution, and every American has the right to rely upon it. Exercising that right is not, by itself, evidence of guilt or innocence.

But constitutional rights do not eliminate legitimate public questions.

Many Americans have asked why a public official whose decisions affected nearly every household in the nation would decline to answer questions before Congress, particularly after receiving a presidential pardon covering specified federal conduct. Whether the pardon was necessary or not, it inevitably intensified public curiosity rather than resolving it.

Transparency matters because trust matters.

Trust is retrospective as well as prospective. People make judgments about whether an individual or institution can be trusted going forward based on whether there has been an honest account of what has been done previously. A truthful reckoning can repair lost credibility while continued evasion further erodes trust. An enormous opportunity to repair a relationship was lost yesterday. There is a cost to silence.

Another aspect of the public debate concerns Fauci’s financial success. During his government career, he became one of the highest-paid federal employees, earning a substantial government salary over many years. Since leaving public office, he has also earned significant income through speaking engagements, book contracts and other opportunities available to prominent public figures.

There is nothing inherently improper about earning money legally after public service.

The real question is different.

How should Americans evaluate a public servant whose influence over national policy was unprecedented, while millions of ordinary citizens absorbed the financial and personal costs of those policies?

That question deserves an honest discussion, not because success should be criticized, but because accountability should never depend on status.

Critics have also argued that, during both the Trump and Biden administrations, Fauci exercised an extraordinary degree of independent influence over public messaging and pandemic policy. Supporters contend he followed the science as he understood it. Critics argue that he often appeared to function as an independent policymaker rather than simply a scientific adviser.

Reasonable people continue to disagree about those judgments.

What should not be controversial is the principle that no public official elected or unelected should be beyond scrutiny.

Congress exists in part to examine the decisions of government officials. That oversight is not political revenge. It is one of the Constitution’s safeguards against excessive concentration of power.

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped American life unlike any event in generations. The decisions made during that period deserve careful examination, not to refight every debate, but to prepare for the next national emergency.

Americans deserve clear answers about how major decisions were made, what information was available at the time, where mistakes occurred and what lessons have been learned.

Accountability is not about humiliating individuals.

It is about restoring public confidence.

If mistakes were made, acknowledge them. If judgments proved incorrect, explain why. If policies produced unintended harm, say so honestly. Democracies become stronger when leaders are willing to answer difficult questions instead of allowing uncertainty to linger.

The cost of reckoning deferred is not abstract. We learned during Wednesday’s hearing that Fauci, as early as February 2020, was privately sympathetic to the theory that the virus emerged from the Wuhan laboratory. We learned that he knew, even then, of evidence that the DNA sequence of the virus suggested it was manufactured rather than naturally occurring. We learned that there was no scientific basis for six-foot social distancing or prolonged school closures.

By not sharing what he knew or strongly suspected in those early days, the nation lost the opportunity to course-correct. Physicians and scientists who questioned prevailing assumptions were dismissed, deplatformed, threatened and harassed for raising concerns that later proved to be legitimate subjects of debate. Fauci and his colleagues came to embody a government monopoly on truth; at one point, he even declared that attacks on him were attacks on science itself. While they knew or suspected one thing, they told the American people another.

Ordinary mistakes can arise from imperfect judgment or human weakness. Betrayal, however, corrodes the bonds of trust that hold a society together. We are left weaker and more fragile in the wake of these events, slower to trust, left to our own doubts and reflections. A nation that cannot take the scales firmly in hand and honestly examine how it performed during its last great crisis is poorly positioned to confront whatever crisis comes next.

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[Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.]

As if readers didn’t already know which side the Times often takes when it ‘reports’ political news, the so-called ‘paper of record’ has once again reported what looks like a news piece but reads like an editorial.

At the Wall Street Journal, former news department editor-in-chief Matt Murray describes what a news story should offer: “Sound news reporting is based in facts, impartially gathered and fearlessly presented,” he writes. “It relies on objective, baseline truths that are knowable. Great reporters are curious, skeptical, challenging, open, empathetic and genuinely impartial—and go where the facts lead.”

Paul Gigot, who oversees the Opinion pages at the WSJ, clearly lays out what he looks for in editorials: “Wall Street Journal readers want information, but they also want to make their own judgments about what they are learning,” writes Gigot. “Our commentary is intended to inform on the issues of the day, with the added purpose of stirring debate and helping readers decide for themselves what they think.”

Writers at the Times, the WSJ and many other news organizations presumably have been taught this basic distinction in journalism school or wherever they began writing professionally.

Turning reporting into editorial journalism may well be a consequence of the politically divisive times in which we live.

The Times’ coverage of The MAHA Report story, dated July 30 and titled, “Book Sales for the ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ Spike Following the Fauci Hearing,” written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, is its most recent case in point.

Our article was based on the fact that the Skyhorse book, The Real Anthony Fauci, went from out of Amazon’s top one hundred books in the nation, to, the day after the Fauci hearing, #69, #52, and, after the story was published, #42.

These facts are unimpeachable.

The Times article about our report gives only the smallest red flag: “Spotlight on Fauci Said to Boost Books Sales for Kennedy and His Publisher.”

The “Said” is valid; the Times isn’t suggesting it knows more than our report. It is signaling that it’s simply reporting on our report.

But is it – and if not, where does it go off the rails?

The article starts innocently enough. “Mr. Kennedy’s mini book tour came as Republicans accused Dr. Fauci of enriching himself by enriching staff and colleagues to enter contests with cash awards, including a $1 million prize that government ethics officials allowed him to keep.”

But now comes the “but”:

“But Mr. Kennedy,” writes Stolberg, who covers the intersection of health policy and politics, “Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chaired the hearing; even Mr. Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy III have all published critical books about Mr. Fauci whose sales may have gotten a boost from the negative public attention the men have helped generate against him.”

The three books in question, all published by Skyhorse Publishing, are Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci; Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up; and Kennedy III’s fictional, The Confessions of Anthony Fauci.

Noting that RFK Jr. and Paul have promoted their books while holding public office, Stolberg goes after both by revealing what they’ve been paid and reaching out to ethics experts about a potential conflict of interest.

“Ethics experts say that Mr. Kennedy, his son and Mr. Paul did not cross any legal or ethical lines,” Stolberg writes, “but several said the secretary and the senator did cross a threshold for hypocrisy by using their platforms to sell books about Dr. Fauci while accusing the scientist of profiting from his own public service.”

Stolberg quotes Kathleen Clark, an expert in government ethics and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Clark tells her that public officials using their respective platforms to promote books “may not be a legal conflict, but it is a conflict, and it may help explain their actual motivations.”

Stolberg also goes after Skyhorse and MAHA Action president, Tony Lyons, on the ethics of selling books while running a political action committee (MAHA Action, Inc.). She quotes Lyons fairly, but again wants to show how he and his authors are hypocritical; in her view, they’re doing the same thing they’re accusing Fauci of doing. Profiting personally while either holding public office or, in Lyons’ case, running a PAC.

Even if Stolberg is correct and Lyons and his authors are guilty of being hypercritical, that doesn’t make them wrong about Fauci. Nor does that make the article’s larger project any less certain: to defend Fauci while exposing some of his enemies.

In case there’s any doubt in Times’ readers minds as to what her point of view might be, here’s how Stolberg ends her article:

“In a diary he kept on his government computer, which Mr. Paul released publicly,” writes Stolberg, “Dr. Fauci wrote that he had mentioned Mr. Kennedy’s book to a lawyer, Don Walker, before its publication, saying it would undoubtedly be “a very scandalous.” Mr. Walker, he said, “was adamant that we [sic] should do nothing about this since Bobby Kennedy has absolutely no credibility.”

And the kicker?

“That was five years ago, long before anyone envisioned Mr. Kennedy would become secretary,” Stolberg writes.

In other words, we’re in scary times, my friends. Mr. Kennedy is not only unhinged but he’s in charge. We need more Anthony Fauci’s of the world, not fewer.

Does Stolberg’s ending, building on what came before it, sound “open, empathetic, and genuinely impartial”?

Not to this reader.

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On July 29, the embodiment of science itself, Dr. Anthony Fauci, invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times as he was shredded by Republican Senators for Covid-era lies that were once promulgated as absolute truth by traditional media outlets.

Days before, Fauci’s diary was posted publicly in Senator Rand Paul’s Reading Room, exposing the stark differences between his public statements and his private thoughts, which he stupidly placed on a government-owned computer. A running theme in Fauci’s diary was his addiction to the media adoration he received.

Fauci bathed in his celebrity status, luxuriating in the attention as though it were a scented bubble bath.

Fauci’s statements became policies because the media went along with every word he uttered – even when they contradicted previous statements. What Fauci said became the official narrative.

But the dam began to break.

The MAHA Report helped spread the news that Stephen A. Smith had publicly apologized to basketball star Kyrie Irving for criticizing him for not taking the Covid vaccine.

The Fauci hearing triggered an explosion of outrage that has been simmering for years – outrage about the damage caused by the Covid lockdowns, non-scientific social distancing recommendations, masking orders, vaccine mandates, and Covid vaccine injuries.

And on Sunday, Dr. Ashish Jha, the man who replaced Fauci as President Biden’s Covid Czar, said he now believes that the Covid virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – publicly disagreeing with Fauci’s claim that the virus jumped to humans from animals.

But where are more journalists questioning what they were told in the heat of the Covid battle? Thomas Jefferson famously believed in a free press as a safeguard to keep the government in check.

During the pandemic, legacy journalists lost their way; they forgot the vital role they must play to keep a democracy healthy. Ask tough questions? Question authority? Little of it.

Unfortunately, today many of the same journalists who refused to question Fauci, and other voices spreading his gospel, are still confused about their profession.

Enter CNN’s Dana Bash, host of “State of the Union,” whose staff made the decision to book Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, onto its Sunday, August 2 broadcast.

Perhaps the thinking was that Bash would spend her twenty plus minute segment attacking Kennedy with the usual talking points on his ‘anti-vax’ crusades, his ‘spreading conspiracy theories.’

Perhaps the idea was to take the most visible figure of the medical freedom movement and use him as a scapegoat, a patsy, to put the anti-official narrative – about the origins of the pandemic, vaccines, and more – back into an impenetrable box, a safe place where journalists don’t have to do the real work their profession requires.

Whatever the motivation, things did not go as planned.

Bash, with no hard facts to back her up, tried to land a punch on Kennedy, who barraged her with facts.

Dana got bashed.

For the dying official Covid narrative, and for CNN, the interview was a disaster.

Bash attempted to shift the blame for failed Covid policies from Fauci to President Trump. Kennedy explained that Trump wanted to open the country back up but Fauci’s public statements – trumpeted by the legacy media – influenced many governors to keep lockdowns in place.

Kennedy also noted Covid policies continued for eighteen months into the Biden administration.

Bash asked what Kennedy would do differently when the next pandemic occurs.

“Listen to the doctors on the front lines,” he said, explaining that there were therapeutics that were working but doctors who were saving lives were shut down. “We weren’t listening to them,” he said. “We were doing the opposite.”

If there is another pandemic, Kennedy said, “We need to protect our Constitutional rights.”

For Bash, apparently the notion of protecting people’s rights was not something that should be considered.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“We began censoring people in violation of the First Amendment,” Kennedy responded. Bash went on: “You’re talking about rights; I’m talking about a potential public health crisis that is coming.”

For Bash and CNN, the Constitution applies only when unelected public health officials say so.

“Doctors who said, ‘you’re doing it wrong’ were marginalized and vilified,” Kennedy added.

Bash then stated, “I really want to move on.”

Kennedy dished back, “Because you were part of the problem.” He added, “It was absolute press malpractice…Your job is to maintain a fierce skepticism toward authority. And you weren’t doing that. You were beating up on people who were dissenting.”

As though she were a sales rep for a Big Pharma company, not a journalist, Bash pivoted to promoting Covid vaccines.

Kennedy cornered his opponent on the reckless Covid vaccine recommendations for children and called Bash out when she could not cite the studies she based her claims on. Bash said she spoke to ‘scientists’ and ‘experts.’

Kennedy noted that legacy media sites ‘experts’ instead of doing the research and reading the actual science.

The interview became more heated when Bash said, “The president wants you to probe the link between autism and vaccines?”

“He certainly does,” Kennedy replied.

Bash read from her prepared script printed on pretty blue paper: “Have you talked to him about medical research that has studied this for twenty-five years and found no link between vaccines and autism? And this is my question here, because I don’t want to litigate that…why not study what could cause autism which scientists believe starts with fetal brain development…why not study whether there are environmental factors that go into a predisposed genetic situation?”

Kennedy responded that studies to determine environmental causes of autism are being done. “That’s one of the ways we found the link between perinatal Tylenol use and autism onset.”

Kennedy said Bash was wrong when she asserted that the issue has been studied. “And you’re rolling your eyes, Dana,” he said.

”I am because I don’t want you to use our air to say this,” Bash answered.

Pause.

“Use our air”?

What would Jefferson say?

Perhaps: “Your attempt to suppress real debate, Dana, is a blow to democracy.”

Returning to her pretty blue script, Bash read a statement prepared by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Kennedy pointed out that the Institute of Medicine said none of the eight vaccines administered in the first 6 months of life have ever been studied for a relationship to autism.

Bash called these words “categorically untrue.”

Kennedy responded, “You’re sounding like a parrot…Trust the experts like you trusted Fauci… now you’re rolling out the experts again to talk about something that you have no personal knowledge of…You’re getting the best science from someone who is lying to you.”

It was a remarkable moment.

Bash didn’t want to debate Kennedy, she wanted to ridicule him.

It backfired.

The great Covid reckoning has begun.

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[Originally published on July 30 in The Washington Times under the title, “Medtech: A great value in American healthcare”; republished with permission from the author.]

There is a lot of talk in Washington about “value” in healthcare. Some suggest the best way to create value is to simply lower costs by limiting the procedures and products available to patients. But what this misses is the long-term value these procedures and technologies provide both to patients themselves and the healthcare system overall.

The medtech industry has a powerful story to tell here: The cost of the medical technologies, devices, and equipment that fill hospitals, clinics, and home healthcare settings has remained very steady for decades. Not only is medtech not a cost driver; it is actually a cost saver. Here’s how. The diagnostic tests, technologies, implants, wearables and digital tools developed by medtech innovators help doctors find disease earlier, treat it more precisely and manage it before a crisis requires far more expensive, invasive, and possibly even less effective treatment. Increasingly, AI-enabled medtech, for example, has the potential to extend that value.

Consider breast cancer screening. A prominent study found that AI-assisted mammography helped doctors detect 29% more breast cancer instances than radiologist review alone, without increasing false positives. It also reduced doctors’ reading workload by 44% and found 51% more in situ cancers, often described as non-invasive.

The stakes are clear. When breast cancer is found before it has spread, about 99% of patients are alive five years later. When it is found after spreading to other parts of the body, that rate falls to roughly 30%. The financial stakes move in the same direction. Early treatment can take weeks; late treatment can mean years of surgery, chemotherapy, medicines, repeat scans, emergency visits and other care. By one analysis, breast cancer treatment costs were roughly twice as high for later-stage disease as for earlier-stage disease.

Those potential savings are not abstract. They are hospital days not needed, procedures avoided, complications prevented, and costs Medicare, Medicaid, employers and families may not have to absorb. Across the roughly 288,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer each year, even a modest shift from late diagnosis to early diagnosis could save lives and reduce spending.

That same value proposition appears across many areas of healthcare, including diabetes, which cost the United States $412.9 billion in 2022. Some of the most expensive episodes are dangerous blood sugar emergencies that send patients to the emergency room or ICU. Continuous glucose monitors help patients see problems earlier and act sooner.

One large real-world study found that starting a flash glucose monitor was associated with reductions in hospitalizations for serious diabetes emergencies in both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, with the improvement lasting two years. Every avoided admission can mean fewer emergency visits, inpatient stays, and related costs.

Cardiac care tells the same story. For a patient having a heart attack, a stent can reopen a blocked artery before the heart is badly damaged. One widely cited economic analysis found that reopening blocked arteries after a heart attack adds more than a full year of life expectancy at a cost near $40,000 — a strong value by commonly used medical cost-effectiveness standards.

Outcomes keep improving: one recent analysis found that deaths within a year after emergency artery-opening procedures for the most serious heart attacks fell by roughly 30%. Without timely treatment, patients face greater risk of heart failure, repeat hospital stays, disability and higher long-term costs.

Medical technology, alongside advances in prevention, treatment and care delivery, has contributed to major public health gains. Since 1950, death rates from heart disease have fallen by roughly three-quarters. Across five major cancers, prevention and screening helped avoid 4.75 million deaths over 45 years. Another analysis estimated that cancer screening generated $6.5 trillion in value and 12 million years of life over 25 years.

This should matter to budget hawks. Medtech is a part of healthcare where competition and iterative innovation can improve products while helping hold prices in check. It accounts for less than 6% of national health spending. Since 2000, overall medical prices have risen much higher than the prices for medical equipment made by manufacturers.

Part of the reason is that medtech is fast-moving and highly competitive. Companies invest more than $20 billion each year in research and development, and improved products often reach patients every one to two years. Each new version aims to do more for patients while reducing burdens on doctors, hospitals, and payers. That value is not theoretical. It is realized every day in operating rooms, heart procedure rooms, imaging centers, clinics, and homes across America.

It is also an American strength. U.S.-made technologies supply about 70% of the domestic market, generating more than $250 billion in annual output and nearly three million direct and indirect jobs across 16,000 facilities in all 50 states. The industry exported $80 billion in 2024 — more than automobiles or semiconductors. America is a global leader in medical innovation, supporting patients, workers, and communities at home.

At the same time, the federal government is now the largest payer of the nation’s $5.3 trillion healthcare bill. As policymakers debate affordability for patients and payers, they should elevate technologies that help avoid the costliest parts of care: late diagnosis, preventable hospital stays, complications, disability and worsening disease.

Those are just the kinds of results we all want: earlier answers, earlier treatment, and better use of a strained healthcare workforce.

For the woman whose cancer is caught early, the man with diabetes who avoids the ICU, and the heart attack patient who walks out of the hospital alive, the value of medtech is concrete. By helping deliver earlier diagnoses, better outcomes, and avoided downstream costs, medtech should be a headline, never a footnote, in healthcare policy debates.

Scott Whitaker is President and CEO of AdvaMed.

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By the time the hearing was over, millions of Americans understood why Senator Paul had such a single-minded focus in delivering Fauci to this moment. Many now would not shed a tear if Fauci did hear the clang of prison doors slamming shut behind him.

Anthony Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the man who directed the federal government response to the Covid pandemic, was dragged over the coals by Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Ron Johnson (R-WI), James Lankford (R-OK), Rick Scott (R-FL), Josh Hawley (R-MI), Bernie Moreno (R-Oh), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Ashley Moody (R-FL).

Fauci left the Dirksen Senate Hearing room in silence with his retinue of attorneys – minus David Shertler, who was removed by Committee Chair Paul for disrupting the hearing.

The people in attendance applauded Shertler’s removal.

Fauci rose to unprecedented popularity during the Covid pandemic, becoming ‘America’s Doctor.’ He once claimed to be the very embodiment of science. Starting in 2020, a fawning legacy media lavished Fauci with praise. While the Covid pandemic raged, Fauci’s star rose. His diary, which he kept on a government computer (and was therefore government property), was released to the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (author of the bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci), along with thousands of other documents.

Fauci’s diary showed that he bathed in the glory of media attention while thousands of Americans were dying alone in isolated hospital rooms.

But the Covid virus, which fueled Fauci’s apotheosis, also carried the seeds of his demise. Revelations about the real origins of the virus dripped out. The public came to understand that the very virus which led to Fauci’s fame was triggered by the reckless gain-of-function research which he endorsed and secretly funded.

Fauci denied funding gain-of-function research under oath in previous Senate hearings.

And that was only one of Fauci’s lies.

That damned virus, which Fauci claimed jumped to humans from “nature,” was almost certainly ‘leaked’ from a Chinese biolab that Fauci funded through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.

Fauci funded the monstrous research that created the virus. In the end, Fauci and his government-funded scientists could not contain the microscopic monster they created.

Of course Fauci denied it all. He led a public relations campaign to attack and smear anyone who claimed that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“They’re conspiracy theorists.”

“They’re anti-science.”

The legacy media backed him to the hilt and actually became government partners in the suppression of speech about the origins of the pandemic. Legacy media outlets and social media platforms became agents of censorship.

Fauci gave multi-million-dollar grants to researchers to write the proximal origins paper to create the natural origin hypothesis narrative, even though many of the researchers privately expressed fears that the virus was man-made. Fauci used his influence with the media and the intelligence community to promulgate the most disastrous lie of the century.

Fauci’s response to his senatorial pinata treatment was to invoke the Fifth Amendment – 111 times.

After a few exchanges, Fauci’s rigid delivery of the same one-liner made for deadly theater – Samuel Beckett without irony.

Senator Rand Paul: “This is when the debate about (gain-of-function) began, you wrote in support of this in the Washington Post and you said, even if a scientist is bitten, even a pandemic should occur, the knowledge is worth the risks. Do you still stand by that?”

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

Senator Rand Paul: “There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.”

Senator Ron Johnson asked Fauci if he was aware that then CBER Director Peter Marks suppressed an algorithm that revealed massive Covid vaccine safety signals, “including sudden cardiac death, cerebral artery occlusion, basal ganglia stroke, agonal rhythm, Bell’s palsy, and pulmonary infarction.”

He continued, “Your diaries now show that you actually suffered pulmonary infarction…I was wondering whether it ever went through your mind that maybe that injection, all those boosters you took might have caused that.”

Senator Johnson then asked, “Were you ever made aware of the fact that Peter Marks was warned that the algorithm (he chose to use) was going to hide the safety signals and were you told that senior FDA officials were showing dozens of safety signals associated with the COVID injection?”

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

Senator Bernie Moreno confronted Fauci regarding the draconian Covid policies he championed. Moreno recalled an event in which a family was arrested for sitting in the stands at a high school football game. Moreno asked, “Who the #%@& do you think you are? It is a total disgrace what you did to this country.”

Fauci did not respond.

Senator Josh Hawley accused Fauci of illegally using his staff – taxpayer funded civil servants – to solicit prize money for himself. One award provided Fauci with over $900,000. “You were getting rich while hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying,” Hawley said. “You turned your staff into a full-time application machine.”

Hawley then attacked the premise of Fauci’s use of the Fifth Amendment, “Let’s just get one thing straight. You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you’ve been pardoned. As you very well know, the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more, Brown versus Walker, 1896 – ‘when he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.’ You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you now shifting nervously in their chairs, they know it…This is about contempt. Contempt for this body and contempt for the American people.”

Fauci again sat in silence.

Senator Joni Ernst confronted Fauci on his decision to approve the use of “aborted baby body parts” in mice research conducted by virologist Ralph Baric. “They wrote that they had created ‘a sandwich’ of aborted body parts in the mice.” Ernst then asked, “Dr. Fauci, do you think that human aborted parts should be put into mice to do Corona Virus research?”

Once again, Fauci took the Fifth.

Senator Moody pressed Fauci on the pre-emptive pardon he received from President Biden. “Did you talk to President Biden and ask for this pardon?

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

Senator Moody: “Who did you talk to in the White House about this pardon?”

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

Senator Moody: “Did you specifically ask that it be dated back to the beginning of 2014?”

Dr. Fauci: “On the advice of Council, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Senator Moody: “Did you do that so that you would be given immunity going back to the beginning of 2014?”

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

Senator Moody: “I’m just very interested in why it was this date. Did it have anything to do with the fact that 2014 was also the year that the NIAID, or NIH began funding EcoHealth Alliance, understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence grants?”

Once again, the embodiment of science took the Fifth.

Democratic Senators were present but did not ask Fauci questions. Rather, they defended him, many saying it was time to move forward and not dredge up issues from the Covid era.

Mary Holland, the CEO of Children’s Health Defense, was in the hearing room and felt disappointed in the Democrats. “Everyone in the room wanted justice. What was so shameful is that the Democrats defended Fauci.” Holland added, “Millions of people died and they don’t want to talk about it.”

And Fauci, sticking to his stale legal script, did not want to talk about it either.

In the end, Fauci leaves the public stage as a deflated, sad, silent villain. He could be incarcerated for a while for Contempt of Congress. However, Fauci is eighty-five years old and could never serve all the time he deserves.

Let God judge him.

As for the rest of us mortals – we are left with a greater challenge: the need to make sure that we prevent anonymous, embedded bureaucrats from ever again seizing the kind of power that Fauci amassed. To do that, we must insist on transparency and accountability. We must make sure that making America healthy again includes making our republic healthy again.

No white-coated expert should ever again be allowed to tell people to isolate, shun their dying relatives, not practice their religion, and submit to a poisonous potion.

The type of monster that Fauci became and the type of monster he unleashed is still glaring at us from the darkness.

In silence.

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That itself was a huge victory long in the making.

During the pandemic, Sen. Paul, like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scrutinized Fauci’s decision making and his role in funding gain-of-function research, which resulted in the 2023 book, Deception: The Great Cover-up.

Many in the legacy media ignored the book. Now it’s clear it was prescient.

“Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally while privately, he was well aware of a mountain of evidence suggesting the virus originated in the lab,” said Sen. Rand Paul toward the start of Wednesday’s hearing with Fauci, organized by the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

“The American people deserve answers,” Paul continued. “The American people deserve to know why dangerous research was funded by NIAID in a totalitarian country. In a lab that lacked acceptable safety standards. The decision to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, will likely go down in history as perhaps one of the worst public health decisions. Frankly, the American people deserve an apology.”

But Fauci had no answers. He stuck to a well-rehearsed script crafted by his legal team: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci said 111 times, including every time Paul asked a question.

“It is secrecy that destroys trust,” said Paul .“It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy. Trust can’t be ordered, it has to be earned. No scientist is above scrutiny, no government official is beyond accountability, and no public servant has the right to treat the suffering of millions of Americans as a footnote to his preferred version of history.”

Senator Paul was on to Anthony Fauci from the start. Wielding unimaginable power as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, Fauci had misled the country about the origins of the Covid pandemic and shut down scientific dissent.

When he appeared before a Senate committee in July of 2021, and Sen. Paul challenged him on his refusal to acknowledge that the experiments he’d funded were in fact gain-of-function and thus a violation of federal policy, reminding him that it’s a crime to lie to Congress, Fauci snapped. “If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you!”

It was a shocking breach of decorum – for a witness to verbally attack a U.S. Senator in a hearing – and showed Americans how arrogant this longtime bureaucrat who sat atop the nation’s public health bureaucracy had become.

Sen. Paul recently released a huge trove of documents to the public in a ‘Reading Room’ on his website. Among them are over 1,000 entries from Fauci’s diary – a daily record of Fauci’s media appearances and his participation in meetings of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and briefing members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

They reveal a man excited by the start of the pandemic in 2020, who relished the attention he was getting. “Amazing day!” he wrote in the entries for several days in January and February of 2020 as the new virus began to spread from Wuhan to Europe, and then the West Coast of the U.S., with people falling ill and dying often within days.

As demonstrated by the thoroughness of his book, Sen. Paul has been relentless in his drive to get to the truth of where SARS-CoV-2 came from and who funded its creation, and to force those involved, including Fauci, to come clean.

To Fauci it may seem like an obsession, but to many Americans, it’s the all-important search for the truth.

In the pursuit of the truth of the origins of the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, Sen. Paul subpoenaed Fauci to testify before his committee. It was uncertain whether Fauci would comply with the subpoena and appear on Capitol Hill, three and a half years after retiring from the federal government.

He did appear, with a bevy of lawyers. But after an opening statement in which he accused the chairman of unjustly pursuing him, he claimed a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and refused to answer any of the questions that were posed to him, by Rand and other committee members.

In his closing statement, Sen. Paul played a video featuring Fauci repeatedly saying in media appearances that the virus had come from the wet market in Wuhan, when privately, in his diary, Fauci wrote that he knew it hadn’t come from there. He also criticized Fauci’s dismissal of natural immunity, a phenomenon known to humanity for thousands of years, from the time of the Athenian Plague. And he told Fauci that he wished he would have sought effective treatments for Covid-like steroids, which resulted in a 37 percent reduction in death.

“I would have been willing to accept an apology today,” Sen. Paul told Fauci.

But there was no apology from Fauci. Just silence.

[Deception: The Great Cover-up, by Rand Paul, was published by Regnery, a division of Skyhorse, in 2023. It’s available through MAHA Action, here.]

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The diary of Anthony Fauci that was released to the public over the weekend shows a man thrilled to be in the epicenter of the action, with President Trump showering him with praise and White House staff swarming to take selfies with him.

The diary entries show his glee as the virus spreads from its apparent starting point in Wuhan, China, and begins infecting people around the globe.

Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, obtained Fauci’s diary and released it online on Saturday on a section of Paul’s official webpage called the Reading Room. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a man at the very center of the nation’s response to the Covid pandemic.

Fauci headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38-years and was the highest-paid employee in the federal government at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, earning even more than the president of the United States.

It could be said that he had more power than a Cabinet member, given that he was burrowed into the federal government and controlled more than $7 billion in grants each year. At a 2021 hearing, Fauci said that attacks on him were attacks on science itself. It was a ridiculous statement. But through NIAID grants that funded the work of thousands of scientists, as well as almost all major universities in the country, Fauci did largely control which scientists got funded, and which did not.

That power created a vain monster.

“Amazing day today!” Fauci wrote on January 29, 2020. Lou Dobbs, then host of the top-rated show on the Fox Business network, had called that morning, telling him he told President Trump that Fauci was the “smartest person” around and he should speak to him.

Fauci further records going to Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who lavished him with attention “(big hug, kiss and telling everyone how great I am – a little embarrassing),” his diary entry reads.

Later on January 29, he went to the White House for a meeting led by Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff, and after about an hour President Trump came in “…and the first thing he said as he looked at me was: ‘Anthony, you are really a famous guy’…He then stayed for 20 minutes and asked most of his questions of me.” When Trump was leaving the meeting, Fauci writes, the President smiled at him and said: “Thanks, again, Anthony. We are counting on you.”

January 30, the day that he briefed the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was “another amazing and difficult day,” Fauci records in his diary, noting that Rep. Ana Eschoo, a Democrat from California, said in the meeting that she “…felt safe in my arms.”

He notes as an afterthought: “Cases 7700 with 170 deaths,” making a record of the death toll of the new virus, not yet considered a pandemic at that point.

January 31, 2020, was “Another truly amazing day,” Fauci wrote. He says that he was sequestered in the White House all day, that he briefed President Trump, and that they then went into the White House Briefing Room and did a press conference.

“[HHS Secretary Alex] Azar led the presentation, but many questions were answered by me,” he writes.

Fauci’s diary may be difficult reading for anyone who lost a family member to Covid or who was shut out of a hospital while their father, mother, husband or wife died in isolation. It may be hard decades from now for people studying the Covid-19 pandemic to understand why a man in Fauci’s position would have spent so much time journaling about the attention he was getting from the media and politicians and celebrities.

In 2020, Fauci seemed to be having the best year of his life. Nowhere in his diary does he reveal distress or the sense of the terrible tragedy unfolding as the virus escaped China and spread rapidly across Europe, and as cases were first identified in the United States. There is also no curiosity or concern about how best to treat people infected with the new virus, or reflection on where it could have come from.

The tone of the Fauci diary entries is upbeat, presenting a man near ecstatic that the events of early 2020 have catapulted him to a level of fame few people have experienced – the leader of the free world lavishing him with praise, movie stars sending him flowers, and governors begging for his advice.

As we read deeper into the Fauci diaries we see the man’s growing obsession with the attention he’s getting.

On March 1, 2020, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called him at his home asking for advice on how to handle Covid and telling him how much his father, former Governor Mario Cuomo, and his mother, had respected Fauci and how proud they were that he was an Italian-American.

On March 9, Gov. Cuomo called him again to get his advice on whether to close schools in the Orthodox Jewish area in Westchester County, New York.

Fauci tells him ‘yes.’ Close the schools.

But it’s the things that are missing from Fauci’s diary that are most interesting, and it’s important to note what these are, because of what it means for the continued search for answers about the origin of the pandemic.

You won’t find the name “Ralph Baric” or even the last name, Baric, in the diaries. Except in the text of articles that Fauci was posting in full, in the pages of the diary. This despite the fact that Fauci was talking to Baric, the coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina in early 2020, when the virus first emerged.

Fauci is believed to have invited Baric to join the very important February 1 conference call with top scientists, organized by Fauci and his counterpart in Britain, Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust.

In his diary, Fauci includes a detailed list of the participants on that call and their affiliations. The only American listed, other than Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins, is Robert Garry, professor of virology at Tulane University School of Medicine.

Fauci left off the name of Ralph Baric. Why?

The call was organized after Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Robert Garry and Andrew Rambaut all began talking to each other about the new virus, with all four agreeing that it appeared as though it had come out of a lab.

After hearing this, Farrar and Fauci quickly organized the February 1 call with a larger group, including Marion Koopmans, the head of the Department of Viroscience at Erasmus Medical Center in The Netherlands, who did her PhD on coronaviruses and also serves as an advisor to the World Health Organization; her deputy, Ron Fouchier; and Christian Drosten of Germany.

The original group of four – Andersen, Holmes, Garry and Rambaut – weren’t told that Baric was also on the call. Baric was a silent participant and did not introduce himself.

The original four all argued for lab origin, while the three Europeans added by Farrar all said it had to be of natural origin.

Baric is a key figure in the investigations into the origin of Covid-19 as he was the author of a 2015 paper on gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses, to make them more easily transmissible and more pathogenic. One of his listed co-authors was Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And in 2021 Baric was discovered to have been the lead scientist on a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to perform gain-of-function on a coronavirus by inserting a furin cleavage site in a certain place on the molecule. The proposal was called DEFUSE. It was submitted under DARPA’s PREEMPT program. And while the proposal did not win approval, there are suspicions that the work had already been performed, or was performed afterward, either by Baric or by others – thus creating what became known as SARS-CoV-2.

Two days after the big Feb.1 call, Baric called Kristian Andersen. According to Andersen, Baric “attacked” him and his argument that the virus had been engineered in a lab.

Did Fauci invite Baric to join the call for the purpose of gathering ammunition to use against Andersen, to bully him into dropping any idea that the virus may have come out of a lab?

What did Fauci really know or suspect about the origin of the virus? It’s not in the diary entries. But leaving Baric’s name off the list is a sign that he was hiding something, and an indication he suspected that the diary entries would one day be made public.

Congressional investigators have focused on the Feb. 1 call and on Fauci’s actions that followed it, guiding what became the “Proximal Origins” paper in Nature Medicine, the purpose of which was to kill any speculation that the virus could have been manipulated in a lab.

That paper, published as a ‘correspondence’ on March 17, 2020, was authored by Andersen, Holmes, Rambaut and Garry, along with Ian Lipkin of Columbia University.

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in the summary.

However, Slack messages from June of 2020 recently released by Sen. Paul showed that Andersen and Holmes did not actually believe the anti-lab origin narrative. They still believed the virus could have come from a lab – with Andersen saying he thought there was a 30 percent chance of a lab origin, and Holmes saying he thought there was first a 20 percent and then a 10 percent chance. Also missing from Fauci’s diaries is any talk of the possibility that the virus was a bioweapon, except in one instance where he notes on August 28, 2021 that the intelligence community’s report on the origins of the virus was released.

“The intelligence community report on the origins came out and in some respects it was good news in that they felt fairly confident that it was not a bioweapon nor that it was bioengineered,” he wrote. He then knocked the FBI, the one intelligence agency that believed the virus was the result of a lab leak, commenting that this was “based on no data at all.”

Fauci also bristles at Stanford University microbiologist David Relman, saying in an article in Nature that he would like to see all the records of the NIH “in their dealing with Chinese scientists. Truly amazing! There is no doubt that he has an agenda here and that is unfortunate.”

But what was Fauci’s agenda early on when some of the top evolutionary biologists in the world were developing strong suspicions that the virus was manmade? It was to head them off, to end the debate, to prevent any media from exploring the possibility that the virus was a bioweapon, and that it was either leaked, or was intentionally deployed.

Anthony Fauci’s diary only confirms what many of us already knew: That the man who was the face of the nation’s coronavirus response was arrogant and self-absorbed. It doesn’t answer what Fauci really knew or suspected about the true origins of the virus. But the absence of Baric’s name from the Feb. 1 call list, and Fauci’s determination to silence debate about the origins of the virus, should lead to increased scrutiny. We have to get to the truth.

[Wednesday’s hearing with Dr. Fauci will be streamed live at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on numerous networks]

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