Fauci's Follies

An excerpt from my book, 'Follow the Science'

The following are excerpts from my national bestseller, “Follow the Science.”

Fauci’s Follies

Did Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have some diabolical intent behind his many misstatements and falsehoods? Was he beholden to unseen masters due to conflicts of interest? Or was he simply utterly befuddled? Whatever the case, he became one of the most important disinformationists of the pandemic, yet was never held accountable.

The die was cast against Dr. Fauci’s credibility as early as March of 2020, in the first weeks of America’s pandemic, when I heard him tell one of his biggest whoppers under oath.

As director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the lead Covid advisor to the White House, Dr. Fauci repeatedly cited jarring and scary figures in public. On March 11, 2020, while testifying to Congress, he stated that Covid-19 was “ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu.” The alarming testimony generated international headlines that blared across the Internet and television news, and remains frequently cited today.

I was skeptical. I’d read far more conservative assessments from some of Dr. Fauci’s learned colleagues in academia and even, as it turns out, from Fauci himself!

“[T]he case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%,” Dr. Fauci wrote in an article two weeks later, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on March 26, 2020. “This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

Why was Dr. Fauci contradicting his own public testimony and giving a far softer take on Covid’s potential to kill, when writing in a scientific journal? Here he was saying Covid’s death rate was like a bad flu season, not ten times deadlier as he’d just claimed to Congress.

To confuse matters further, just one day after the NEJM article, I found Dr. Fauci back to repeating the higher fatality number rather than “considerably less than 1%.”

“The mortality of [COVID-19] is about 10 times [flu],” Dr. Fauci tells Comedy Central host Trevor Noah on March 27, 2020.

Though Dr. Fauci was never shy about granting television interviews, from local news and the networks, to CNN and Fox, he wouldn’t agree to an interview with me for my Sunday television news program Full Measure. So I posed the simple questions to his office via email: Which of his accounts was accurate? Was Covid’s death rate similar to that of the flu, or ten times deadlier?

Dr. Fauci didn’t answer. And among members of Congress or journalists who were able to get close to him, I never heard the questions asked. Nor was the bizarre discrepancy in Dr. Fauci’s accounts widely scrutinized in the press.

There are many other examples of Dr. Fauci making conflicting claims. One that received some media attention was his flip-flop on masking to prevent the spread of Covid. After originally saying masks wouldn’t work, he became part of the effort to impose strict mask mandates and shame those who chose to show their faces. He even advocated wearing more than one mask at a time! Yet, you may recall he was caught on video at an outdoor sporting event, sitting maskless close to his friends. One could speculate that Dr. Fauci knew all along that masks wouldn’t stop Covid from spreading, despite what he told the public.

In an email later obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Dr. Fauci had said as much to a friend who’d apparently asked if she should wear a mask. It was early in the pandemic, on February 5, 2020.

“The typical mask you buy at a drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material,” Dr. Fauci told his friend. “I do not recommend that you wear a mask.”

In fact, Dr. Fauci seemed to get it wrong on most every critical point involving Covid-19. He shamelessly promoted the experimental and unproven vaccines without reservation and, as I mentioned earlier, joined vaccine makers in furthering the false narrative that Covid vaccines would prevent infection. For example, on December 12, 2020, he claimed the vaccines had “been found to be up to 95 percent effective in preventing the COVID-19 illness.”

A year later, he was still banging the same drum in the face of all evidence to the contrary. “We do have interventions, in the form of a vaccine to prevent infection,” Dr. Fauci insisted, even though it’s well known the vaccines do not prevent infection.

…

Along Came Covid

When President Joe Biden got Covid twice in July of 2022, his second and third known Covid infections, he became the most public living symbol of the lapses, confusion, and government misinformation that mark America’s long Covid nightmare.

Biden—along with top advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci; the head of Pfizer, Dr. Albert Bourla; and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky—all had insisted the vaccines would prevent Covid. By the end of October of 2022, they counted at least nineteen shots among them, and nine bouts with Covid. Dr. Walensky, five vaccinations into her personal Covid prevention program, had just battled two cases of Covid in one nine-day period, with the CDC refusing to answer my questions about exactly when she’d had her shots, or whether she’d had Covid before. Why the secrets?

On March 29, 2021, in an appearance on MSNBC, Dr. Walensky famously and falsely proclaimed, “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus. Don’t get sick.” I was dumbfounded. Much of the world already knew from personal experience that the CDC director was dead wrong on this point. Vaccinated people were getting ill with Covid in large numbers, and would soon outpace the number of unvaccinated people sick from Covid. How could it be that nearly everyone knew better than the head of the world’s most prestigious infectious disease authority?

No matter. With science misrepresented at the highest levels, a conflicted news media was all too happy to perpetuate the false information rather than question it or even tell both sides. The left-leaning magazine Fortune, purveyor of slanted and false information on numerous topics, blasted out an untrue, unqualified headline: “It’s official: Vaccinated people don’t transmit COVID-19.” According to the media, whatever a favored public figure utters is “official” and true, even when it’s patently false.

Even within a sea of government disinformation, this newest Walensky flub stands out as really, really bad. Not to mention easily disproven on its face. That must be why Dr. Walensky’s own agency quickly issued a sheepish-sounding correction. A CDC spokesman understated, “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get COVID-19.” Years later, when I checked, the false Fortune headline remained. “Vaccinated people don’t transmit COVID-19.”

The more the government, media, and other vaccine industry interests tried to discredit Covid counter-voices, the more they discredited their own positions. In fact, propaganda that promoted Covid-vaccines-at-any-cost arguably did more to undermine confidence in America’s vaccination program and public health authorities than anything I’ve witnessed. Examined this way, it becomes clear how destructive the wholesale attempts to control “science” and medical information has become.

Much has been written about the Covid postmortem. A lot of it has been inaccurate or missed the point. This chapter examines ten key moments among a voluminous number of misrepresentations made to the public by once-trusted authorities. Together, these “moments” illustrate how deceptive modern science has become, and explain far better than anything else why we find ourselves in such critical condition.

1. The Truth About Isolating at Home

There was strong, early evidence that public health recommendations to “isolate at home” actually spread Covid! We now know with certainty that infected people, some of them without symptoms, stayed indoors, sharing breathing space with family for long periods of time, increasing the odds that they would spread the virus to loved ones. Independent scientists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, who advocated against Covid shutdowns from the start, rightly said that people should have been encouraged to spend time outside, visiting parks and beaches. By the time our federal health authorities admitted scientists like him were correct, the erroneous guidance had taken a large toll.

An early hint that it was a mistake to instruct people to lockdown and stay in close contact with each other at home comes on May 6, 2020. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo makes a little-examined comment that catches my ear. At the time, New York is suffering the first big Covid spike in the US. Cuomo delivers what he calls shocking news: the vast majority of people sick in the hospital with Covid had isolated themselves just as the government asked! To be specific, Cuomo says early data from one hundred New York hospitals reveals that two-thirds, or 66 percent, of new Covid-related admissions are people who had largely sheltered at home—most of them retired or unemployed.

Shouldn’t this revelation have made international news and guided us to quickly reconsider stay-at-home orders?

Cuomo goes on to add that another 21 percent of the hospitalized patients came from group living facilities, mostly nursing homes that were practicing strict Covid controls, including isolation and masking. So that makes a total of 87 percent among the seriously ill who had not gone out to grocery stores, shopping malls, parks, beaches, restaurants, or the office. They were not riding in taxis and Ubers, or on the subway. They were not at concerts and parties, or going out to visit friends and family.

“This is a surprise,” Cuomo remarks. “Overwhelmingly, the people were at home. We thought maybe they were taking public transportation, and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation, but, actually no, because these people were literally at home.”

The remarkable data seems to fall on deaf ears. It’s not what the government and medical establishment want to hear. They’ve already loaded the American public onto a train barreling irreversibly toward a chosen destination. So they continue to urge people to stay home. And when it comes to the venues that are actually the safest, such as outdoor parks and beaches: they’re shut down. How many people got ill or died because public health officials dismissed hard data that was evident from the start?

An exclamation to this point comes with the famous annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. In August of 2020, 460,000 bikers descended upon the Black Hills of South Dakota at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, making the rally one of the year’s most-criticized events in the media. Another reason it fell under such criticism is that a lot of the attendees were supporters of President Trump. The media and politicians quickly labeled it a “superspreading” event. One “scientific study” claimed the Sturgis rally was responsible for more than a quarter million Covid-19 cases, an astonishing 19 percent, or nearly one in five, of all cases reported in America at the time! To me, the wild claims weren’t credible on their face. I’d learned to trust my cognitive dissonance and decided to investigate further. Why weren’t hundreds of journalists questioning the obviously questionable narratives instead of blindly furthering them?

In early 2021, I set off for Sturgis. It’s a charming small town of about 7,000 people in western South Dakota. It’s flanked on the south by the craggy mountains of the Black Hills National Forest. It’s a cold, cloudy day and the Sturgis I see when I arrive is pretty quiet. Not at all like the town looks when the throngs come for the rally. I connect with city official Daniel Ainslie for an interview. He begins by recounting outlandish anecdotes of people who’d been counted as “Sturgis” Covid cases back in their own home states even though they’d never stopped anywhere near Sturgis or the rally!

“We had one individual that stated that they were just driving to Washington State, and they were driving along I-90, which of course runs through our community, and so then they were counted as one of the Sturgis recipients, even though they didn’t even stop in Sturgis,” says Ainslie. “According to their state health official, apparently they were a Sturgis victim of the coronavirus.”

Ainslie tells me that in advance of the rally, a contingent of assorted special interests warned town officials that if they didn’t cancel the 2020 rally, models predicted Sturgis hospitals would be overwhelmed, and up to 5 percent of people in town would die!

Fortunately, nothing even close to that happened.

The truth is, there’s no way science could tell if anybody was infected at Sturgis, let alone who and how many. But a lot of hard data shows how wrong the alarmist media reporting and “scientific” projections proved to be.

First, based on statistics that health officials publicized and used at the time, any group of 460,000 people should have seen several hundred Covid deaths among them. However, even the hyperbolic media reports ultimately linked Sturgis to only between one and no more than five possible fatalities. That’s an incredibly low number—and those were pure guesswork. Also, none of those deaths was scientifically traced to the rally; they were just the only ones the media could find in anyone who had supposedly been to the event.

Second, community-wide mass testing in Sturgis after the rally found a mere 26 Covid-positive cases out of 650 people tested. Again, that’s a far, far lower rate than most anywhere else.

Third, news reports about Sturgis that were intended to sound upsetting actually proved to be reassuring, when critically examined. For example, a New York Times article stated: “In all, [Sturgis Motorcycle Rally] cases spread to more than 20 states and at least 300 people—including revelers’ families and co-workers who never set foot in South Dakota.” But again—only 300 cases among 460,000 attendees? That works out to an infection rate of just .065 percent, or about six-hundredths of 1 percent. That would make the Sturgis rally one of the safest places in America—not a superspreading event!

In summary, to try to claim that there were a quarter million Covid infections from Sturgis, as a San Diego State University IZA study had done, was “ridiculous . . . fanciful, and it was just pushing their narrative,” observes Ainslie.

Far too late, the CDC tacitly acknowledged that its recommendation to isolate indoors was a mistake. The agency eventually noted on its website, “Spending time outside when possible instead of inside can also help [prevent Covid spread]: Viral particles spread between people more readily indoors than outdoors.” Mayo Clinic wrote more plainly: “It’s much harder to catch the virus . . . when you are outside.” And the EPA now states, “Being indoors rather than outdoors” increases the risk of infection.

………

3. Mortal Mistakes

Calculating how deadly a disease is—its fatality rate—is mathematically simple. It requires fourth-grade skills. Take the number of deaths (numerator) and divide it by the total number of people who caught the disease (denominator). The denominator should include people who got sick as well as those who were infected but didn’t actually have symptoms, or “asymptomatic” cases. So let’s say 100 people get Ogre Virus, and two of them die. That’s 2/100. The death rate for OGREVIRUS is 2 percent. Simple.

But I noticed early and often during the Covid pandemic that officials routinely made bush-league calculation mistakes. And somehow, the mistakes always resulted in exaggerating Covid’s dangers.

Here’s one way that happened. According to the CDC at the time, most people infected with Covid had few or no symptoms and were unlikely to get tested. But as I mentioned, their numbers still needed to be represented in the total disease group, or denominator, in order to calculate an accurate death rate. Omitting the people who had Covid, perhaps asymptomatically, but didn’t get tested would make the denominator too small and result in the death rate seeming far worse than it was. Yet officials routinely excluded these people! Instead, they used only the subset of people who’d tested positive for Covid. This error had the impact of greatly overstating Covid’s fatality rate.

By way of example, let’s return to OGREVIRUS. Assume there are 100 people, and 40 get sick (testing positive), and 60 are infected without symptoms (and never take a test). Next, assume 2 die. That makes the fatality rate 2/100, or 2 percent. But what if you made the mistake of calculating the fatality rate using 2 dead among only the 40 sick people who went and got tested instead of all 100? The OGREVIRUS death rate jumps from 2 percent to 2/40, or 5 percent! Now OGREVIRUS appears to be two and a half times deadlier than it really is!

That’s exactly what public health experts did over and over again with Covid fatality calculations—unchallenged by their colleagues, analysts, and the media. I found it mystifying that I seemed to be the only reporter to note this fallacy. I began searching scientific literature to confirm whether my rudimentary math exercise was, in fact, accurate. I discovered an article on this very topic cowritten by Drs. Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University. They rightly pointed out that “the true fatality rate” should be calculated among all infected people, not just the subset of those identified through a positive test. They commented that, as I’d observed, the common miscalculation done with Covid was resulting in startling but inaccurate figures. For example, Italy’s much-publicized Covid fatality rate of 8 percent was estimated using confirmed cases, rather than total infections. Drs. Bhattacharya and Bendavid pointed out, Italy’s “real fatality rate could, in fact, be closer to 0.06%.”

4. More Math Tricks

The more people who get vaccinated, the less Covid there should be—if the vaccines work. Don’t let anyone double-talk you into thinking there’s something more complicated to it. Yet as millions quickly got vaccinated in 2021, the trend line went in the wrong direction. Covid infections rose to record levels, far outpacing the pre-shot numbers. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand what a disappointment the Great Vaccine Hope turned out to be. In fact, it quickly began to seem possible that vaccinated people were more likely to get Covid.

On August 6, 2021, Dr. Walensky and the CDC were once again bringing up the rear. They finally acknowledged, publicly, that fully vaccinated people who catch Covid can infect others, after all—something they’d long denied. There’s no legitimate explanation for why the media often refused to report headline-worthy worthy studies reflecting this fact, such as one published by Harvard and Canadian scientists in September of 2021. It found that the more highly vaccinated a population was, the more Covid cases there were. According to the scientific analysis:

[C]ountries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified . . . by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.

The numbers here in the US were equally concerning. In fall of 2021, about three in ten Covid deaths (30 percent) were vaccinated people, according to The Kaiser Family Foundation. By January of 2022, that rose to about four in ten (40 percent). Then, by April 2022, CDC data showed that most deaths, six in ten (60 percent), were among vaccinated people.

Every time hard data undercut the government and vaccine industry messaging, a convincing new narrative had to be invented. It would require some deft sleight of hand to explain away this trend and keep people on board with an endless parade of equally ineffective boosters. So the final master narrative about vaccines was put on the table. See, the reason more vaccinated people are getting sick and dying of Covid is that there are more vaccinated people, the propagandists told us. It’s basic math! You’re not stupid, are you?

“More vaccinated people are dying from COVID, but that’s due in large part to a larger percentage of the whole population being vaccinated & the effectiveness of boosters waning,” read a typical tweet on the topic. Another tweeter who tried to explain away the high number of deaths among the vaccinated wrote, “There are many more vaccinated people.”

But for that explanation to make sense, the explainers would have to be indirectly admitting vaccines don’t work in the first place. If the shots are not effective, then yes, as more people are vaccinated, there will be more deaths among vaccinated people. But if the vaccines actually work, the larger vaccinated crowd would make up a far smaller proportion of Covid deaths.

I saw this ridiculous “more-people-are-vaccinated” rationale deployed in a coordinated fashion by propagandist publications such as Scientific American, and amplified by many seemingly intelligent people. To them, the nonsensical seemed to make perfect sense.

Here’s another numbers trick that a lot of people seemed to fall for. It was the CDC’s practice of giving the impression that it was very, very dangerous to be unvaccinated. For example, CDC’s website boasted a frightening claim: unvaccinated people were nearly 13 times more likely to die from Covid! The agency also routinely publicized other studies that sounded terrifying. One covered “25 jurisdictions” and found “the death rate was 53 times higher among the unvaccinated than the boosted.” “People have a much higher chance of dying from COVID if they’re not vaxxed,” warned a typical tweet in response.

But even if we accept the CDC’s chosen interpretations and its most-amplified numbers at face value, it still glosses over an important but unstated takeaway: Covid’s overall death rate was proving to be minuscule, regardless of whether the person was vaccinated or not. Why wasn’t that a headline—that Covid rarely kills? And why wasn’t Covid’s low lethality balanced against the risk of relatively untested vaccines with serious side effects, short and long term, known and as yet unknown, when given over and over? Why was the CDC always seeming to choose the most alarming public health message that promoted the experimental vaccines, instead of providing balanced, rational, and measured advice?

5. Natural Immunity Deniers

One of the worst failings by the CDC and public health officials was their abject denial of the power of natural immunity. Here, too, propagandists manipulated statistics for their own purposes.

Unlike the CDC, many independent scientists correctly predicted early on that natural immunity after Covid would work better than any vaccine. This is how it’s always been with illnesses and vaccines. Even Dr. Fauci initially touted the power and hope of natural immunity before deciding to almost singularly promote an endless string of Covid vaccines and boosters.

When natural immunity’s superiority over Covid vaccines became evident in the scientific literature, vaccine industry interests worked to engineer data to make it seem as if vaccines were more effective than they were.

By way of example, assume this scenario that ignores natural immunity: Out of 100 people, half are vaccinated and half are unvaccinated. Forty-five of the 100 get Covid in the newest wave. Among the 45: 15 were vaccinated but 30 were not. In other words, 15/50 of the vaccinated got Covid. But 30/50 of the unvaccinated got Covid. The vaccine looks highly effective! It’s twice as dangerous to be unvaccinated!

But that’s only if you pretend natural immunity from infection doesn’t exist.

Out of the same 100 people, consider this possibility: What if all 55 of the people who didn’t get Covid in the newest had natural immunity from a prior infection? And what if none of the 45 people who got Covid had a prior infection? Suddenly, it’s natural immunity that emerges as the powerful defining factor, and the vaccine becomes irrelevant. By not considering natural immunity, the CDC made it impossible for ordinary folks to factor in one of the most important protective factors of the pandemic.

Based on what we know, we can assume that if natural immunity hadn’t proven to be so effective, the CDC would have publicized numbers demonstrating that. The fact that the agency pretended the question was unimportant gives away the truth.

Late in the game, the CDC quietly acknowledged that people who’d had Covid were, indeed, protected by natural immunity. But the agency still used phrasing that would tend to promote vaccinations, anyway. On its website in November of 2022, the CDC posted: “If you become ill with COVID-19 after you received all COVID-19 vaccine doses recommended for you, you are . . . considered up to date [emphasis added]. You do not need to be revaccinated or receive an additional booster.”

6. Word Games

Everybody knows what it means to be vaccinated. At least we used to. The failure of Covid vaccines to prevent infection, transmission, symptoms, or serious illness gave rise to some serious wordsmithing by vaccine industry interests. They sought to redefine current meanings and invent new ones. They had to, in order to keep the masses in a state of suspended disbelief, complying with increasingly questionable vaccine requirements.

Once upon a time, there were two simple-to-understand terms: “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated.” However, the Pfizer and Moderna RNA vaccines required two shots in the initial series. A person might have gotten one shot but, we were told, that didn’t count as “fully vaccinated.” (As an aside, this means the CDC found a way to skew their statistics and dismiss the many people who got Covid after their first shot but before the second. They weren’t counted as vaccine failures because they weren’t “fully vaccinated” at the time.)

Next, a whole lot of people were still getting Covid shortly after the second shot. So now, we were told, those people weren’t “fully vaccinated” until two weeks passed after the second shot. This adjustment, again, magically prevented untold numbers of people who got Covid within two weeks of their two-shot series from getting counted in the vaccine failure tally. You see, they weren’t fully vaccinated. In fact, it masked the very real possibility that vaccination was making people more likely to immediately catch Covid.

Then, as more “fully vaccinated” people continued to get Covid more than two weeks after their second shot, the goalposts were moved again. We were told that to be considered fully vaccinated, you actually needed a booster in addition to the two shots and the two-week wait. As more people with boosters got Covid anyway, they needed yet another booster to be considered fully vaccinated. And another.

Meantime, most everyone got Covid at least once, vaccinated or not. The illness rarely became serious or fatal, and the vaccines became virtually meaningless in terms of impact. But rather than give up, vaccine industry interests doubled down. They decided we should get annual Covid vaccines. So the CDC announced its intention to shelve the term “fully vaccinated” altogether and replace it with “up to date.” That means your obligation to continue getting vaccinated in order to supposedly be protected—never ends.

It’s not just the concept of “fully vaccinated” that needed a revamp in order to shoehorn reality into the pro-pharma agenda. When the Covid vaccines failed to meet the definition of “vaccines” because they clearly didn’t prevent the disease, there was a successful campaign to literally redefine the word. Why admit a product is a failure when you can unilaterally change the meaning of a word and claim it’s a success? So in early September of 2021, on CDC’s web page, somebody made the change. “Vaccine” had been defined as “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.” But the phrase “protecting the person from that disease” was removed. Today the CDC says that vaccines merely “stimulate the body’s immune response.” This Orwellian redefinition of two hundred years of the world’s understanding of what constitutes a vaccine was executed without so much as an explanation, public discussion, or vote.

7. Elderly Risks Ignored

Early in the nation’s Covid vaccination program, I made it my mission to do some original research. It wasn’t easy to find time, with my full-time television news program and a serious obligation to teach TaeKwonDo and train for my fifth-degree master’s black belt. But I knew that if I was going to be positioned to speak authoritatively to important, emerging trends, I’d have to do dig in and do some deep dives. A lot of that was accomplished in the quiet hours in the middle of the night. I’d sit at my computer with background noise on the television losing track of time, trying to defeat Google-forced search results in order to find information that powerful interests don’t want us to see.

As I conducted my research, it seemed to me that many health officials and journalists were recirculating the same conjecture, quoting the same dubious sources, and not doing their own independent fact-finding to confirm or cast doubt on what we were all being told. The worst part was how many medical professionals, reporters, politicians, and “fact-checkers” were claiming to definitively know things that they couldn’t possibly know. Meantime, independent researchers and other voices were being bullied and censored if they asked logical questions or presented facts that challenged medical establishment narratives.

I’d already learned that one of the easiest ways to find raw, unadulterated data is to comb through the online federal database called VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It is something I’ve done countless times over the years when looking for side effect trends.

Looking through the VAERS entries at the start of the Covid vaccine push, I quickly identified two small clusters of deaths in elderly people after they were vaccinated at nursing homes in Kentucky and Arkansas. These cases should have raised eyebrows at the CDC and garnered great attention in the scientific community. But they didn’t.

In Kentucky, four seniors died the same day they got the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on December 30, 2020, according to VAERS reports. Three of the four reportedly already had Covid prior to getting vaccinated. In other words, the vaccine was of no known benefit and could even prove harmful, but they were given it anyway. Victim number one was an ill eighty-eight-year-old woman described as “14+ days post covid.” Someone had given her the shot while she was “unresponsive in [her] room.” She died within an hour and a half. The second death was that of a man, ninety, who was “15 days post covid.” He was given the shot and died within ninety minutes. A third report says an eighty-eight-year-old woman who was “14 + days post covid” got her shot, vomited four minutes later, became short of breath, and died that night. And an eighty-five-year-old woman vaccinated at 5 p.m. was “found unresponsive” less than two hours later, and died shortly after.

In response to my questions about the Kentucky cluster, a spokesman for the CDC said its experts noted “no pattern . . . among the [Kentucky] cases that would indicate a concern for the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine.”

In Arkansas, four more seniors died at a long-term care facility about a week after vaccination. All four had gotten the Moderna vaccine. All tested positive for Covid after vaccination! There’s no indication as to whether they had Covid when they were vaccinated or acquired it after their shots. Three of the four patients got their shots on December 22, 2020, and died about a week later. The person reporting the case of an eighty-two-year-old man who died six days after his shot said he’d been vaccinated in an attempt to “mitigate his risk” and that “this was unsuccessful and [the] patient died.” Two elderly women, ages ninety and seventy-eight, got vaccinated on January 2, 2021, tested positive for Covid about a week after their shots, and died. The unnamed person who reported the ninety-year-old’s death speculated, “the vaccine did not have enough time to prevent COVID 19,” and added the ridiculous and unsupported comment, “There is no evidence that the vaccination caused patient’s death. It simply didn’t have time to save her life.” A fourth patient at the same facility was a sixty-five-year-old man who was also vaccinated on January 2. He died two days later.

In response to questions about the Arkansas cluster, the CDC told me, “Surveillance data to date do not indicate excess deaths among elderly patients receiving COVID-19 vaccinations.”

What makes these deaths even more significant is something that Norway was discovering very early in its vaccination program. There, 23 people also died shortly after vaccination. After investigating 13 of the deaths, Norway’s medical agency concluded that common side effects from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, such as fever, nausea, and diarrhea, “may have contributed to fatal outcomes in some of the frail patients.”

“There is a possibility that these common adverse reactions, that are not dangerous in fitter, younger patients and are not unusual with vaccines, may aggravate underlying disease in the elderly,” said Steinar Madsen, medical director of the Norwegian Medicines Agency. Of course, this should have come as no surprise. We’ve already discussed how vaccination or other medicine can exacerbate a preexisting vulnerability. In Norway, they paid attention to the possible danger signs and recommended that the frail and elderly avoid the shots. In the US, our health officials explained away the warning signs.

In combing through VAERS reports, I found numerous other early cases of elderly, frail people in the US who’d had Covid, got vaccinated, and died. A ninety-six-year-old Ohio woman tested positive for Covid in November of 2020, got the Pfizer vaccine anyway in a rehab facility after a fall a month later, and died that afternoon. A ninety-four-year-old Michigan man at a senior living facility who had Covid and other illnesses got the Moderna shot anyway on January 2, 2021, and died of cardiac arrest two days later. A ninety-one-year-old Michigan woman with Alzheimer’s and other illnesses at a senior living facility who’d tested positive for Covid got the Moderna jab anyway on December 30, 2020. She died four days later. And an eighty-five-year-old California woman with Alzheimer’s and other disorders at a senior living facility had asymptomatic Covid but was given the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine anyway on January 5, 2021. She was found dead the same day. A 104-year-old woman in New York got the Pfizer vaccine on December 30, 2020. The next day, a Covid test was done and came back positive. She became ill the following day and died on January 4, 2021. A seventy-one-year-old New York man was given the Moderna vaccine on December 21, 2020, developed a fever and respiratory distress, and tested positive for Covid. He was given the government-endorsed injectable medicine remdesivir. He died after six days.

A World Health Organization vaccine safety subcommittee reviewed reports of deaths among the frail and elderly after the Pfizer vaccine and assured the public that there was no cause for concern.

I wonder how many lives might have been lengthened if we’d taken greater care to examine the risks of vaccinating the frail and elderly, or if we’d understood the consequences of vaccinating older people who’d already had Covid. Put differently, how many lives were cut short?

8. The CDC’s Big Lie

What makes the case of elderly deaths after vaccination most concerning is that the victims were all vaccinated shortly after the CDC disseminated important but shockingly false information that may have cost them their lives. The CDC wrongly claimed the original vaccine studies definitively showed the shots somehow benefited people who’d already had Covid. But the studies didn’t show any advantage to people who’d already had Covid. It wasn’t even a main research question addressed during the rushed studies. So there was no good reason to vaccinate the nursing home patients who’d already had Covid.

Further, it could be argued that some of the scant data gathered early on indicated that, if anything, previously infected people who got vaccinated were at greater risk of getting Covid. For example, in Pfizer’s study, for test subjects who’d already had Covid, the vaccine had an effectiveness of minus 17.9 (−17.9 percent). In simpler terms, they were more likely to get Covid again after vaccination according to some scientists who reviewed the study. And in Moderna’s original study, test subjects who’d had Covid, then got vaccinated anyway, were six times more likely to have to drop out of the study because they suffered such serious side effects.

On its website, the CDC publicized its disinformation about Pfizer and Moderna studies supposedly finding that vaccination provided benefits to people who’d already had Covid when none had been proven. The agency distributed the false information in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The inaccurate claims were signed by the CDC’s esteemed group of vaccine advisors. Remarkably, none of them seemed to know or care that the CDC’s misrepresentation of the original vaccine studies was untrue and could prove harmful.

It wasn’t Pfizer, Moderna, the government’s top health experts, public health officials, medical reporters, or “fact-checkers” who unearthed the CDC’s error. They all just parroted and passed around the same bad information. Had any of them actually read the studies? It was a member of Congress who exposed the truth. Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, identified the CDC’s disinformation in December of 2020, while researching whether he should get vaccinated after he’d already had Covid.

As part of his personal query, Massie ended up secretly recording an astonishing series of phone calls with a string of duplicitous CDC officials and scientists. When pressed by Massie on the calls, they seemed to reluctantly admit that they knew the vaccine studies didn’t show what the CDC had publicly claimed. Yet their conversations with Massie were filled with double-talk, and the officials balked at the idea of publicly correcting their misinformation. In January of 2021, I published these revelations and the audio recordings in a story for Full Measure.

In the phone calls, Massie can be heard pressuring the CDC to tell the public the truth: that the original vaccine studies did not show any benefit to people getting the shots if they’d already had Covid. Shockingly, just days after one recorded conversation in which CDC officials finally agreed to make corrections to the public record, the same CDC officials took part in an online webinar for medical professionals where they repeated the misinformation. In that presentation, the CDC’s Dr. Sarah Oliver reiterates the false claim: “Data from both [vaccine] clinical trials suggests that people with prior infection are still likely to benefit from vaccination.”

For weeks, in a series of phone calls, Massie kept up the pressure on the CDC to tell the truth. The CDC eventually issued a halfhearted correction. I say halfhearted because it used language that would still lead most people to falsely believe the original studies showed the vaccines benefit people previously infected with Covid. What’s their motivation? Why was CDC so stubborn about telling the truth? One possible answer: admitting the vaccines were unnecessary for people who’d had Covid would mean a vastly shrunken market for vaccine makers. After all, Covid was racing through the population at breakneck speed. If all those people wouldn’t benefit from vaccination or, worse, could be harmed by the shots, the vaccine bonanza would be over in an instant.

Another crucial question that all of this raises is why did the CDC’s top advisors—its committee of so-called vaccine expert advisors—all sign off on the false information in the first place? Are they corrupt or just ignorant? The CDC never explained. Nor did it hold anyone accountable.

Meantime, two very large, outcome-based published studies from Cleveland Clinic and Israel in 2021 expanded the knowledge base. They concluded there’s no scientific reason to vaccinate people who already have natural immunity from Covid. Vaccination exposes them to risks with no benefit.

This story is meaningful on several levels. If top CDC scientists and officials are intentionally distributing false information, what does that imply about the advice they’re giving and policies they’re making concerning the many vaccines we give our children, or other disease challenges we face, and the trillions of tax dollars we’ve provided to address these problems?

9. All the Fake Claims

Rather than a single key moment, this category comprises a group of common Covid-related misrepresentations. Many propagandists have attempted to revise history and claim these things were never said. These specific examples prove otherwise.

On November 9, 2020, media reports claimed one of the Covid vaccines “was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants.”

On November 18, 2020, CNN reported that “Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 infections, even in older adults, and caused no serious safety concerns.”

In December of 2020, vaccine makers crowed about their products’ supposed ability to prevent infection: “Moderna’s initial Phase 3 clinical data in December 2020 was similar to Pfizer-BioNTech’s—both vaccines showed about 95% efficacy for prevention of COVID.”

On December 12, 2020, Dr. Fauci claimed the vaccines have “been found to be up to 95 percent effective in preventing the COVID-19 illness.”

On February 12, 2021, an article in USA Today claimed Covid vaccines “were all 100% effective in the vaccine trials in stopping hospitalizations and death.”

On March 16, 2021, Pfizer announced that “its COVID-19 vaccine is extremely effective at preventing both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases of the disease.”

On March 29, 2021, CDC claimed the vaccines were 90 percent effective at preventing infection.

On March 31, 2021, Becker’s Hospital Review reported that “Pfizer says its vaccine is 100% effective in preventing COVID-19 in adolescents.”

On April 1, 2021, Pfizer chairman and CEO Albert Bourla tweeted, “Excited to share that updated analysis from our Phase 3 study with BioNTech also showed that our COVID-19 vaccine was 100% effective in preventing #COVID19 cases in South Africa. 100%!”

Also on April 1, 2021:

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• A study in the British Medical Journal claimed the vaccines prevent infection, as well as symptoms.

• Fortune, New York magazine, The Intelligencer, MSNBC, and many others claimed Pfizer and Moderna shots are highly effective at preventing infection and illness.

• CDC Director Dr. Walensky claimed, “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus—they don’t get sick.”

On June 7, 2021, a CDC study claimed “the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines . . . reduce the risk of infection by 91 percent for fully vaccinated people.”

On June 14, 2021, an article in Science claimed that Novavax, Pfizer, and Moderna vaccines were “essentially 100% protective against disease.”

On July 6, 2021, a Stanford study claimed vaccines prevented Covid infection in nearly 100 percent of people.

On August 27, 2021, the CDC claimed, “The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were approximately 90% effective in preventing symptomatic and asymptomatic infection” of Delta variant.

On September 23, 2021, The Atlantic claimed vaccinated people are less likely to spread Covid.

On October 3, 2021, Dr. Fauci stated, “we do have interventions, in the form of a vaccine to prevent infection.”

On October 7, 2021, President Biden claimed people who are vaccinated “cannot spread it.”

On October 11, 2021, a study by a group of Indian scientists claimed four out of five vaccinated people won’t get Covid.

On November 22, 2021, Pfizer issued a press release claiming its vaccine demonstrated “100% efficacy against COVID-19 in longer-term analysis, with no serious safety concerns identified” in children ages twelve to fifteen.

On December 14, 2021, President Biden claimed that vaccinated people “do not spread the disease to anyone else” and “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

In January of 2022, justices on the Supreme Court displayed shocking ignorance of facts and played a remarkable role in furthering disinformation—even basing decisions on it. At the time, the court was hearing opposition to the Biden administration’s sweeping and unprecedented Covid vaccine mandates. Here is some of the incorrect information repeated by the justices.

From Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

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• Omicron was as deadly or deadlier than Delta

• 100,000 children were in critical care, many on ventilators, due to Covid

• Covid deaths were at an all-time high at the time

From Justice Elena Kagan:

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• It’s “beyond settled” science that vaccines stop Covid transmission

• It’s proven that masks are highly effective at stopping the spread

From Justice Stephen Breyer:

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• Vaccine mandates would prevent 100 percent of Covid cases in the United States

• 750 million people tested positive for Covid-19 on one day that week. (The US population is roughly 330 million people.)

10. Miscounting Covid

One of the biggest and most calculated misrepresentations of the pandemic has to do with how the public health establishment conspired to miscount Covid deaths. There was a time when a news organization with massive resources like the New York Times would have deployed reporters across the country to examine death records and find the true facts. Yet there was no major effort to scratch beyond the surface.

I was able to get at the heart of the matter by visiting an American county where Covid deaths were so few and far between, the coroner was in a unique position to flag any miscounts. It was Grand County, Colorado, about a hundred miles outside of Denver.

It’s a chilly, sunny day when I knock at the door of the inauspicious offices of Grand County Coroner Brenda Bock, who has agreed to an on-camera interview with me. She doesn’t look like a coroner, though I’m not certain what a coroner should look like. She comes off as someone’s friendly, smart, great-aunt. She takes me on a brief, winding tour of the small offices, and then we begin our conversation.

Bock starts by telling me that in November of 2020, she got the sad news that on Thanksgiving Day, a troubled young man named Lucais Reilly had shot his wife, Kristin, in the head, then committed suicide. Both were in their thirties and had alcohol and drugs in their system, along with a history of domestic troubles. Then something strange happened.

“The very next day [the deaths] showed up on the state website as Covid deaths,” Bock tells me. “[But] they were gunshot wounds. And I questioned that immediately because I had not even signed off the death certificates yet, and the state was already reporting them as Covid deaths.”

Bock says some unknown authority had apparently learned about the deaths, run the couple’s names through a database, found they’d tested positive for Covid sometime within twenty-eight days prior to their deaths, then recorded them as Covid deaths even though they were a murder-suicide. Miscounting this poor couple as Covid deaths had the impact of helping to tilt national Covid stats to give the scary misimpression that Covid was killing young, healthy people.

Within a week of the murder-suicide, Bock says, two more Grand County deaths popped up on the state’s Covid count. But she says she had no record of the deaths. So she looked into it.

“[They] were actually still alive,” she says. “And yet [the state was] counting them.” When she called state officials to challenge the deaths, she says she was told, “Oh, well, that was a typo. They just got put in there by accident.”

The mysterious miscounting was so concerning that Bock and Grand County’s commissioners joined to write a letter to Colorado’s governor asking him to correct it. The trend wasn’t just happening in Grand County, according to the chief medical examiner and coroner for Denver, Dr. James Caruso. I also visited with Dr. Caruso on my trip to Colorado. He did an interview with me in his Denver morgue, which was steely and sterile. He was proud to show it off.

“I was told by some of my fellow coroners in the more rural counties in Colorado that it was happening to them,” Dr. Caruso tells me, referring to non-Covid deaths being counted as Covid. “They knew of issues where they had signed out a death certificate with perhaps trauma involved, and they were being advised that it was being counted as a Covid-related death. At some level—maybe the state level, maybe the federal level—there’s a possibility that they were cross-referencing Covid tests and that people who tested positive for Covid were listed as Covid-related deaths, regardless of their true cause of death. And I believe that’s very erroneous, and not the way the statistics needed to be accumulated.”

I asked Colorado governor Jared Polis for an interview about the Covid death miscounts for my TV report. He didn’t agree to talk with me, but a spokesman told me the governor agreed with Coroner Bock’s complaints and was “outraged” that a murder-suicide is recorded as Covid-related. Yet Bock says the governor personally told her he didn’t intend to remove the cases from the Covid count because “all the other states were counting deaths it the same way.”

Amid the controversy, Colorado officials did make one adjustment to their methodology. And it ended up shedding some light on the magnitude of the miscounts. They split Covid deaths into two categories: those who really died of Covid, and those who died of something else but happened to test positive for Covid within a few weeks of their death, like the murder-suicide. What impact did this have? In summer of 2021, the state’s total Covid-related death tally was 13,845. But subtracting the deaths not directly caused by Covid cut the fatalities in half!

As I continued my research, I also found traffic fatalities counted as Covid deaths, an alcohol poisoning counted as a Covid death, and three Colorado nursing home deaths attributed to Covid, even though the attending physicians specifically said the cases weren’t related to coronavirus. One egregious miscount covered on the local news in Nashville, Tennessee, was the case of Hal Short. He tested negative for coronavirus three times right before he died of an aggressive cancer. Yet Covid-19 was listed as the cause on his death certificate. It was only changed after the family repeatedly complained. “How many other people are you making this mistake with?” Short’s widow asks in a news report about the scandal.

I found official death counts that the media relied upon were just as flawed. When I checked in July of 2021, the New York Times Covid death tally overreported Grand County’s 2020 Covid death toll by at least 500 percent. The Times was missing one resident who reportedly died of Covid outside of the county. But the Times mistakenly counted an unrelated heart attack as a Covid death, as well as the two people who Bock found were still alive (who had since been removed from the official state total), and the murder-suicide of Lucais and Kristin Reilly.

Colorado coroners I spoke to are convinced the state was bent on overcounting Covid deaths and they provided examples of that. But the system for collecting the information was such a mess, one could easily argue the theory that the state undercounted Covid deaths. As it stands, nobody can really know for certain. But it sure seemed to many observers that there was an effort to hype the numbers.

Not many localities seemed to be concerned with getting an accurate death count. They were perfectly happy to inflate the numbers with non-Covid deaths, and the feds were all too eager to accept them. One exception was Alameda County, California. In June of 2021, Alameda County officials announced a change in methodology to remove deaths from its Covid count that weren’t a direct result of Covid. That reduced their death toll by 400 people, or 25 percent. The federal government never did take steps to filter out non-Covid deaths at the national level. Yet that step would be crucial to understanding the true cost of the pandemic, and who was most likely to get the sickest.

With these examples in mind, it becomes easy to see how virtually every aspect of “science” during the Covid pandemic was manipulated. The public was asked to swallow a constant flood of disinformation pablum that was forced down our throats by experts we were supposed to trust the most. These experts betrayed their public obligations, violated ethical tenets, sullied their profession, and stole taxpayer salaries and grant money while serving industry masters.

But few breaks in public trust were more consequential than the case of hydroxychloroquine.

Read more in “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails.”