For more than two decades, Tamiflu has been a cornerstone of global pandemic planning.

Governments spent billions stockpiling it, the WHO placed it on its Essential Medicines List, and doctors routinely prescribed it to severely ill flu patients on the assumption that it could prevent complications and save lives.

But until now, no randomised trial had compared Tamiflu with no antiviral in critically ill patients.

The international REMAP-CAP trial has now put that assumption to the test—and found no benefit.

Among 442 critically ill patients with laboratory-confirmed influenza assigned to receive Tamiflu for five days, ten days, or no antiviral, the results were clear.

About 20% of patients given Tamiflu had died by 90 days, compared with about 14% of those who received no antiviral.

In other words, more patients died when they were given the drug.

The authors concluded that Tamiflu was “ineffective and highly likely to increase 90-day mortality” and should no longer routinely be administered to critically ill patients with seasonal influenza.

The new findings are the latest chapter in Tamiflu’s troubled history.

The hype of its arrival

Tamiflu arrived in the late 1990s with a compelling promise. The drug blocked neuraminidase—an enzyme the virus uses to spread from infected cells.

The logic was that if the drug could slow the virus and shorten the aches, fever and fatigue of influenza, perhaps it could also prevent serious complications, hospitalisation and death.

It was an easy sell. Just as antibiotics could treat bacterial infections, antivirals promised to do the same for viral infections.

During the 2009 swine-flu pandemic, that hope became public policy. Tamiflu sales surged to over $3 billion, and governments accumulated vast emergency supplies.

By the time I investigated the drug for an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) documentary in 2015, Australia alone had spent about $380 million stockpiling antivirals.

Governments were not spending that money to shave a few hours off someone’s flu symptoms. They were buying insurance against a pandemic that could overwhelm hospitals and cost lives.

But there was a problem. Much of the evidence supporting Tamiflu remained in the hands of its manufacturer, Roche, and had never been published.

Researchers from the Cochrane Collaboration discovered the problem after they published their first analysis.

“When we did the initial analysis, it was straightforward. We just looked at published data. It showed that the drug reduces complications and the drug also reduces symptoms,” Professor Chris Del Mar told me at the time.

Then they discovered there were trials they hadn’t seen.

“When we looked carefully at the data, we became anxious that there might have been some cherry-picking of the trials that had been published and the ones that hadn’t been published,” Del Mar said.

“We wondered about how many trials had never been published.”

Cochrane asked Roche for the unpublished data, but the company resisted, saying disclosure was unprecedented and citing legal and patient confidentiality concerns.

Cochrane then joined forces with The BMJ, whose editor-in-chief at the time, Dr Fiona Godlee, helped lead a public campaign demanding access.

For Godlee, Tamiflu had become an “iconic” case.

Governments had spent billions stockpiling the drug, millions of people had taken it and yet, the evidence needed to independently assess those decisions remained largely inaccessible.

“There are not only 15 trials of Tamiflu, but 123 trials of Tamiflu, of which 74 are entirely Roche-funded, Roche-controlled, Roche has the data,” Godlee said before a UK parliamentary committee in 2013.

“You begin to see the madness of the situation, that we are getting a very, very partial, incomplete, misleading picture of the effectiveness of many drugs.”

She considered the implications much broader than Tamiflu.

“I think it’s very hard to explain why this behaviour by the pharmaceutical industry in suppressing data over many years is not considered as misconduct,” she said.

“In a scientific experiment, if you suppress data, that’s considered misconduct.”

“This is about patients’ health, public health, and we absolutely have to have all the trial data of trials that are performed on members of the public.”

Missing evidence emerges

After years of pressure, Roche eventually released the underlying material. When Cochrane reassessed the fuller evidence base, the picture changed significantly.

Cochrane’s updated analysis found that Tamiflu shortened symptoms by less than a day, but did not reduce hospitalisations, while the evidence for serious influenza complications was unreliable.

Del Mar put it simply. “It could be that this drug is really just a kind of expensive aspirin. It just makes you feel better.”

By then, however, Tamiflu was deeply embedded in medicine and public health policy.

The ‘unethical’ argument

That presented another problem.

By 2015, influenza experts were arguing that it would be unethical to randomise severely ill patients to placebo because neuraminidase inhibitors had already become accepted treatment.

Godlee saw the flaw in that reasoning.

“Effectively, what you’ve got is trust in a drug that has been created based on biased, selected information,” she told me.

“And as a result of that so-called trust in the drug, we suddenly find ourselves unable to test it in the real situation against placebo.”

Her conclusion was blunt.

“That is a false faith in the drug that is preventing us from getting really good evidence about whether this drug works or not,” Godlee said.

More than a decade later, the REMAP-CAP investigators ran into the same problem.

Some participating hospitals refused to randomise patients to a “no antiviral” group because clinicians considered it unethical to withhold Tamiflu.

But when the trial was finally conducted and the comparison was made, the no-antiviral group had the lowest mortality.

That finding contradicted years of observational studies linking Tamiflu with better survival among hospitalised flu patients.

The REMAP-CAP investigators say those earlier studies may have been affected by differences between patients that the researchers could not fully account for.

Del Mar had warned about relying on such studies years earlier.

“To use observational data, particularly of such poor quality as this, is not a good way to answer a question of whether a drug works or not,” he said.

And then Covid happened

During Covid, antiviral drugs again arrived amid urgency, political pressure and enormous demand for treatments.

Remdesivir was hailed as a breakthrough after early results suggested hospitalised patients recovered faster.

Governments rushed to secure supplies, but WHO’s much larger Solidarity trial later found little or no effect on mortality, initiation of ventilation or duration of hospital stay.

Then came molnupiravir.

In 2021, Merck announced that its new Covid pill had cut hospitalisation or death by 50% in an interim analysis. Australia quickly ordered 300,000 courses and the US government bought 1.7 million.

When the completed trial arrived, the apparent benefit had shrunk substantially. Later, the much larger PANORAMIC trial found no reduction in hospitalisation or death among high-risk vaccinated adults.

Pfizer’s Paxlovid had stronger data initially, substantially reducing hospitalisation or death in high-risk unvaccinated adults.

But demonstrating the same benefit in vaccinated populations has proved much more difficult, with two recent randomised trials finding no reduction in hospitalisation or death in those populations.

Lessons from Tamiflu

The Tamiflu story is ultimately about what happens when confidence gets ahead of evidence.

The drug had a plausible mechanism. Selectively published trials were encouraging. Governments spent billions stockpiling it. Public health authorities embraced it. Doctors came to regard it as standard treatment.

But access to the unpublished evidence showed that its benefits were far more modest and uncertain than originally believed.

By that point, though, confidence in Tamiflu had become so deeply embedded that withholding it from critically ill patients was considered ‘unethical.’

That is perhaps the most remarkable part of the Tamiflu story. Tamiflu had never been properly tested, yet doctors had become so convinced it worked that testing it in critically ill patients was considered unethical.

Godlee called it “false faith” more than a decade ago.

Now, over twenty years after Tamiflu entered routine practice, researchers have finally done the randomised trial that should have preceded its use in critically ill influenza patients.

And not only did they find no benefit—more patients died with Tamiflu than without it.

Pandemics will always create pressure to act quickly, and governments cannot wait for perfect evidence before making every decision.

But spending billions on medicines and administering them to millions of people should come with an obligation to find out whether they actually deliver the benefits being claimed.

With Tamiflu, that question was left unanswered for decades. It should not take another pandemic to learn the same lesson.

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A new preprint analysis from MIT researchers examines data from the CDC’s V-SAFE system—the smartphone app used to actively monitor health outcomes following Covid-19 vaccination.

Led by Retsef Levi and Nelson Lu, the analysis of responses from nearly 10 million people aged 16 and older found that 185,285 individuals (1.87%) reported health deterioration lasting three months or longer and attributed that decline to Covid vaccination.

Roughly half of this group—about 1% of all V-SAFE participants—described their outcomes as severe, including inability to work or perform daily activities, hospitalisation, or potentially disabling symptoms.

The V-SAFE survey reports, collected between December 2020 and mid-2023, remained largely inaccessible to independent researchers until FOIA litigation by Informed Consent Action Network forced their release.

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The old pharmaceutical bribe was easy to recognise. Drug company reps flew doctors to luxury resorts, paid for lavish dinners, disguised kickbacks as consulting fees, and funded educational events that were little more than sales pitches.

A recent academic review published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics examined over two decades of bribery cases, uncovering repeated patterns of sham consulting contracts, fake educational events, luxury travel, and hidden payments.

The U.S. Department of Justice has repeatedly prosecuted industry giants—Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Purdue Pharma—resulting collectively in tens of billions of dollars in settlements and penalties.

Yet despite decades of high-profile prosecutions, Big Pharma’s influence over medicine has not disappeared — it has simply evolved.

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When Moderna and Merck announced yesterday that their experimental mRNA cancer treatment had succeeded in a major Phase III melanoma trial, the response was immediate.

The companies called it a “landmark moment”—the first successful late-stage trial of an mRNA-based cancer treatment. News reports heralded a breakthrough. Elon Musk even declared that “synthetic RNA will cure many diseases.”

Investors were equally enthusiastic. Moderna and Merck’s market values surged, adding approximately $86 billion between them in a single trading session.

But amid the celebration, something important was missing.

The data!

No Phase III results have been published in the peer-reviewed literature, and none have been posted to ClinicalTrials.gov.

Instead, all the excitement rests on a company press release.

Moderna and Merck said the trial showed “statistically significant and clinically meaningful” improvements in preventing melanoma from recurring and spreading to distant organs.

But they have not disclosed how many patients experienced a recurrence, how large the absolute benefit was, whether it differed by disease stage, or how many patients stopped treatment because of adverse events.

The result may turn out to be impressive. But right now, we are being asked to celebrate a “breakthrough” that nobody outside the companies can properly scrutinise.

Not the “vaccine” most people imagine

Despite being widely described as a “cancer mRNA vaccine,” Moderna’s intismeran is an experimental treatment for people who have already had high-risk melanoma surgically removed.

Although they may have no detectable cancer remaining, microscopic cancer cells can survive and later cause the disease to return.

Intismeran is custom-made for each patient.

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Newly recovered communications from Anthony Fauci’s government phone have exposed what senior U.S. health officials knew about Covid-19 vaccine injuries in the earliest months of the rollout.

They also reveal how calculated they were in concealing the systemic flaws in their own safety monitoring.

The documents, part of a cache released by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul following an investigation into Fauci’s pandemic-era communications, directly contradict years of official assurances.

Following the release, Senator Johnson did not mince words.

“They kept saying no red flags, no safety signals,” he told Fox News. “They lied through their teeth to the American public.”

The surveillance myth

In March 2021, FDA vaccine chief Dr Peter Marks told Congress that the agency had implemented a surveillance system using “state-of-the-art technologies,” capable of detecting safety findings “in a relatively rapid manner.”

The CDC echoed that confidence, assuring the public that Covid-19 vaccine monitoring was the “most intense and comprehensive” safety program the country had ever built.

But behind closed doors, leadership knew those very systems had major blind spots.

On May 27, 2021, Dr. Janet Woodcock—then Acting Commissioner of the FDA—sent a confidential email sounding the alarm to Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins.

Woodcock was being contacted directly by people suffering unexplained health problems after receiving one of the three authorised vaccines. Many were healthcare workers. Some she knew personally.

Their symptoms were complex, debilitating, and often difficult to evaluate with standard laboratory testing. Crucially, Woodcock warned that the very surveillance systems officials were relying on to reassure the public might fail to detect what was happening.

“These problems are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect, or even a more sophisticated population-based active follow-up such as CDC has, or a medical record-based system such as BEST,” she wrote.

In other words, Woodcock was warning that the federal safety net had a gaping hole. She doubted vaccine manufacturers would investigate “for obvious reasons” and urged Fauci and Collins to launch a dedicated cohort study.

People were suffering, she wrote, and their primary complaint was that “no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”

“If you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared,” warned Woodcock.

Fauci’s response made clear the warning had registered.

“Janet asks what we think of this?” he wrote to Collins the next day. “We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what Rochelle [Walensky] thinks.”

But publicly, officials continued to reassure Americans about the strength of vaccine safety surveillance. Privately, patients were still struggling to have their injuries recognised.

Dressen calls out officials

Six months after Woodcock’s internal warning, trial participant Brianne Dressen appeared at a roundtable in Washington DC, her life shattered by a severe neurological condition she developed after receiving AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine.

She did not merely accuse agencies of neglect—she said they already knew.

“The NIH, FDA, and CDC have known firsthand about my case and thousands of others,” Dressen testified, revealing that injured patients had engaged in direct video conferences and repeated email exchanges with Woodcock and FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks.

“We have literally asked and we have begged repeatedly for them to acknowledge these reactions. They declined,” said Dressen.

As she fought through tears, Dressen read a message from a friend whose post-vaccine suffering had driven her to end her life:

“Please tell our stories,” was her final plea.

Between sobs, Dressen called out the officials she believed had failed them.

“Rochelle Walensky, Janet Woodcock, Peter Marks, Anthony Fauci, you erased her and the many others like her,” said Dressen.

LISTEN to the vaccine-injured

Researchers eventually began documenting what patients had been reporting.

In 2022, Yale University launched the LISTEN study, led by immunologist Akiko Iwasaki and cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, to investigate people reporting Post-Vaccination Syndrome (PVS).

Studying participants with severe reactions, Yale identified measurable immune-cell abnormalities, evidence of viral reactivation and circulating spike protein—noting that the lack of official recognition of PVS had “significantly limited patient care and support.”

Eventually, questions about the surveillance system reached the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP).

When the reconstituted ACIP met for the first time in June 2025, MIT Professor Retsef Levi challenged CDC staff directly.

He questioned whether traditional safety monitoring—which largely looks for acute harms occurring within a narrow window after vaccination—was equipped to detect problems that might emerge much later.

“Most of our traditional approaches have some implicit assumption that most of the harm is going to happen immediately after the vaccine is being taken and is going to be reduced over time,” Levi told the CDC at the meeting.

Given evidence that mRNA and spike protein could persist in some people, he asked whether that could “challenge the sensitivity” of the current surveillance system and require “a broader set of approaches.”

CDC official Dr Sarah Meyer swiftly brushed aside his concerns.

“We feel very confident in our safety systems in the US,” she replied, looking directly at Levi. “We have one of the best safety systems in the world.”

ACIP tries to shine a light

Behind the scenes, Levi’s Covid-19 vaccine workgroup refused to drop the issue.

By early 2026, it was preparing to bring its findings to ACIP’s public meeting in March.

But just days before the meeting, a federal court order stayed the appointments of 13 ACIP members, paralysing the committee and preventing the presentation.

A confidential copy of the policy document obtained by MD Reports revealed just how far the workgroup had gone.

The findings echoed Woodcock’s warning from five years earlier.

The workgroup concluded that traditional surveillance was designed primarily to detect short-term, acute events, leaving it poorly equipped to identify persistent, multi-system illnesses.

It described how patients were bounced endlessly between specialists while their cases disappeared into aggregated data—potentially creating the impression that chronic injuries were rare when the system was not designed to reliably detect them.

The parallel was hard to miss. Woodcock had identified the same blind spot in May 2021. Nearly five years later, a federal workgroup was proposing ways to fix it.

Levi’s team called for dedicated diagnostic codes, specialised care networks, and clinical guidelines for the injured.

Shortly thereafter, the CDC proposed the first dedicated ICD-10 code for Covid-19 vaccine injuries, creating a formal pathway for patients to be identified, tracked, and treated.

The warning came true

By May 2021, some of the most senior officials in the U.S. health bureaucracy had been explicitly warned that existing surveillance systems could miss the kinds of chronic, complex illnesses patients were reporting.

In the months and years that followed, they watched patients beg for help, saw researchers document vaccine harms, and looked on as ACIP tried to fix the broken system.

All the while, they maintained a polished public façade that everything was fine.

Senator Ron Johnson was right. They lied through their teeth.

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Newly released text messages recovered from Anthony Fauci’s government phone expose a glaring contradiction at the heart of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout for pregnant women.

In January 2021—mere weeks after emergency authorisations began—Fauci privately raised a concern with then-CDC director Rochelle Walensky and incoming US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy:

“Since many people have significant cytokine storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,” he wrote.

Walensky agreed, noting it was “definitely a good point, [especially] after dose two.”

That concern quickly escalated beyond just a theory.

Within weeks, mRNA pioneer Drew Weissman alerted Fauci to data showing that mRNA-LNPs administered to pregnant mice crossed the placenta, reached the foetus, and generated protein that triggered an immune response in the amniotic fluid.

Weissman’s data established a plausible biological mechanism for miscarriage, showing that vaccine components could breach the placental barrier during a critical stage of foetal development.

Subsequent research reinforced those concerns. Studies have since shown that Moderna’s mRNA vaccine crossed the placenta of pregnant mice within an hour, entered the foetal circulation and accumulated in foetal tissue.

But none of this uncertainty ever made it into public messaging.

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With the midterm elections approaching, reports have repeatedly suggested President Donald Trump was being urged to retreat from vaccine reform.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda was said to be politically toxic, with Republican strategists reportedly wanting the administration focused instead on food, chronic disease and the economy.

Much of that narrative rested on polling by Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio, widely interpreted as showing Kennedy’s vaccine agenda was a political loser.

But the polling was never the whole story.

As I previously reported, journalist Emily Kopp revealed that another Fabrizio survey—commissioned by MAHA Action last October—found 73% of voters concerned about vaccine mandates and 90% about pharmaceutical industry influence.

A separate Zogby Strategies survey, released by the Brownstone Institute and Health Freedom Defense Fund, produced a similar picture, finding strong support for informed consent and opposition to medical mandates.

So has Trump changed political strategy? Were his advisers misreading the electorate? Or has he simply decided vaccines are an issue on which he is prepared to absorb the political cost?

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When the FDA licensed Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine last week, legacy media coverage focused almost exclusively on efficacy.

The pivotal trial reported that the vaccine was “26.6% more effective” than a conventional flu vaccine at preventing protocol-defined influenza-like illness.

What received far less scrutiny was a much more serious problem in the trial data published in The New England Journal of Medicine—much of it relegated to an appendix behind a paywall.

An analysis of that appendix alongside the FDA’s own briefing document exposes clear regulatory malfeasance.

A statistically significant safety signal from the pivotal trial was systematically diluted until it disappeared from the official story.

The safety signal

Moderna’s pivotal Phase 3 trial (P304) enrolled roughly 40,000 adults aged 50 and older, randomised 1:1 to either the company’s mRNA-1010 vaccine or a traditional trivalent flu vaccine.

This study evaluated an “optimised” version of Moderna’s vaccine after earlier versions produced disappointing efficacy results.

Even with this updated formulation, the headline “26.6% relative efficacy” figure was misleading. In absolute terms, the vaccine reduced the risk of illness by just 0.8%.

Most concerning, however, were the serious adverse event (SAE) data.

The six-month data show that 449 participants in the mRNA group experienced at least one SAE, compared with 389 in the conventional group—an excess of 60 people.

So, while the pivotal trial showed there were 4 fewer influenza hospitalisations in the mRNA group, 60 additional people experienced an SAE.

SAEs are not mild events—they are usually severe enough to require hospitalisation, threaten life, cause significant disability, or result in death.

The imbalance of SAEs in Moderna’s pivotal trial was statistically significant—meaning it was unlikely to be a random fluke.

Yet in the briefing documents presented to the FDA’s advisory committee, VRBPAC, the agency characterised SAEs as “balanced.”

So how did the FDA make the SAE imbalance disappear?

Making serious adverse events disappear

The short answer is that the FDA used pooled data that obscured the safety signal.

Specifically, the agency relied on Moderna’s own “Integrated Safety Summary,” which combined data from four separate Phase III trials (P301, P302, P303 and P304), involving nearly 72,000 participants.

Once the pivotal trial P304 was combined with the other trials, the SAE rate became 3.1% in the mRNA group versus 2.9% in the comparator group—allowing the FDA to state that the rates were “balanced.”

Pooling data across clinical trials is common when regulators are looking for rare events. But the four trials Moderna pooled were very different in many aspects.

They tested different mRNA vaccine formulations against different flu vaccines—standard-dose and high-dose, quadrivalent and trivalent—across different age groups and countries, with follow-up ranging from six months to a year.

When these disparate trials were combined into a single analysis, the safety signal that stood out in the large pivotal trial was diluted.

The FDA accepted the approach—despite being aware of the problem.

In an appendix to its own briefing document, the FDA acknowledged that differences between the trials could produce safety variations “not fully captured by pooled analyses”—but proceeded anyway.

Table 6 of the FDA’s own review makes the switch even clearer (see below).

For the first 28 days after vaccination, when serious adverse events were still balanced between the groups, the agency reported safety results from the pivotal P304 trial alone (purple box).

But as more SAEs accumulated over the following months, a statistically significant imbalance emerged.

Instead of reporting those longer-term results from P304 in the same way, the FDA switched to Moderna’s pooled analysis (red box), where the signal was diluted enough for the agency to continue describing the rates as “balanced.”

The pooled analysis also obscured a concerning pattern in all-cause mortality.

In the pivotal trial P304, there were 40 deaths in the mRNA arm versus 34 in the comparator arm.

In the preceding trial P303, deaths were consistently higher across all three mRNA sub-studies:

• Sub-study 1 (mRNA vs Standard Trivalent): 5 deaths in the mRNA-1010 arm vs. 1 death in the comparator arm (5 vs 1).

• Sub-study 2 (mRNA vs High-Dose Trivalent): 3 deaths in the mRNA-1010 arm vs. 2 deaths in the comparator arm (3 vs 2).

• Sub-study 3 (mRNA vs Standard Quadrivalent): 3 deaths in the mRNA-1010 arm vs. 1 death in the comparator arm (3 vs 1).

Notably, in Sub-study 1, Moderna’s own trial investigators assessed one of the five deaths in the mRNA group as caused by the vaccine—the same product that has now been licensed.

Together, these numbers raise serious concerns about a possible excess in mortality in the mRNA groups—a pattern the FDA failed to highlight.

One rule for efficacy, another for safety

The FDA’s handling of efficacy reveals an even more striking double standard.

For efficacy, the agency relied strictly on study P304—the large pivotal trial testing the exact formulation submitted for licensure.

Earlier trials of Moderna’s vaccine had produced weaker efficacy results—and in at least one case, negative efficacy. Had the FDA pooled those trials for efficacy, the “26.6% efficacy” figure would almost certainly have been substantially lower.

But, as noted above, when the pivotal trial produced an unfavourable safety result, the FDA did the opposite—it pooled the data.

One approach maximised the efficacy. The other diluted the safety concerns.

Who is protecting the public?

On the surface, the FDA says Moderna’s flu mRNA vaccine is “safe and effective.”

Dig deeper, and the pivotal trial shows a statistically significant excess of participants experiencing SAEs.

Dig deeper still, and you discover the statistical trickery Moderna used—and the FDA accepted—to make the SAE signal disappear.

This brings us back to a fundamental question I have raised over years of reporting on regulatory failure.

When the FDA accepts the manufacturer’s trial design, adopts its data analyses, and rubber-stamps statistical methods that dilute a safety signal, who is actually protecting the public from harm?

Further reading:

June 2026: FDA poised to approve Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine despite earlier rejection

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For several years, concerns over excessive DNA contamination in Covid-19 mRNA vaccines have been investigated almost entirely by independent scientists.

Researchers such as Kevin McKernan and David Speicher have continued to publish findings suggesting that levels of residual plasmid DNA in the vaccines exceed the regulatory limit of 10 nanograms per dose.

Regulators, meanwhile, have consistently maintained that their own testing shows residual DNA levels remain comfortably within acceptable limits.

Then, briefly last year, it appeared that these questions might finally receive official scrutiny.

The newly reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) signalled plans to examine previously overlooked manufacturing and quality issues, including DNA contamination.

Around the same time, FDA scientist Dr Tracy Høeg, then at the Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research, publicly acknowledged that key scientific questions remained unanswered.

But that window of official inquiry closed quickly.

Following a federal court ruling, ACIP’s progress stalled, Hoeg is no longer at the FDA, and fundamental questions about residual DNA remain unresolved.

Once again, much of the work has fallen to independent scientists.

Now, genomics expert Kevin McKernan’s latest work brings us a step closer to a possible explanation for why measurements of residual DNA have differed so dramatically.

At first glance, his recent article is daunting. It runs for pages and is filled with technical language about PCR chemistry, molecular biology and laboratory engineering.

But for all its technical complexity, the central premise is fairly straightforward.

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Anthony Fauci has been held in contempt after refusing to answer 111 questions at last week’s Senate hearing.

Today, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted along party lines to advance a resolution that could ultimately result in criminal prosecution.

All eight Republicans voted in favour, while five Democrats opposed it and two more voted against it by proxy.

Before the final vote, Democrats made five attempts to halt or delay proceedings—seeking more documents, testimony from Fauci’s lawyer, a guarantee that any referral would first go before the full Senate, and a court order granting him immunity.

Every attempt failed.

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At the end of 2020, the public was sold a story of scientific triumph.

The FDA had authorised the first Covid vaccines, television networks broadcast healthcare workers rolling up their sleeves, and public health officials urged millions to get vaccinated with assurances that the shots offered the path back to normal life.

But inside Dr Anthony Fauci’s private diary, a starkly different reality was already taking shape.

Within weeks of the first vaccine authorisations, the scientists closest to Fauci were no longer discussing how the vaccines would end the pandemic, but whether emerging variants might quickly undermine them.

The public never heard that conversation.

On 9 January 2021, less than a month after the first Covid-19 vaccine received emergency authorisation in the U.S., Fauci documented a conversation with Columbia University virologist Dr David Ho.

Ho had begun testing vaccine-induced antibodies against the newly emerging variants from the United Kingdom and South Africa, and the early results revealed some “disturbing data.”

Fauci summarised the discussion. “It looks like the vaccine might be compromised. We need to prepare to modify the vaccine if this observation holds up.”

So, while the public was celebrating the arrival of the vaccines, Fauci’s inner circle had already begun questioning how long they would remain effective.

Three days later, on 12 January, the concern deepened when Fauci recorded that the South African variant caused a “2 to 3-fold” reduction in the potency of vaccine-induced antibodies.

Fauci soon began discussions about using Bill Gates funding to jump-start the development of variant-matched, next-generation mRNA vaccines. Yet when speaking to reporters, Fauci offered only a brief, tentative remark that the variant “could be having some impact... perhaps even for the vaccine. We don’t know that.”

The private warnings escalated again on 14 January when Ho sent Fauci a note warning that “Mutants are becoming very troublesome.”

Ho had observed a “profound” loss of neutralising activity across every serum sample tested, stating that the emerging variants “threaten the effectiveness of the current vaccines” and that additional mutations “could render current monoclonal antibodies and vaccines useless.”

In the weeks that followed, rather than levelling with the public about these scientific uncertainties, official messaging did the exact opposite by becoming increasingly confident.

Media commentators eagerly promoted the narrative, with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow assuring viewers that “the virus stops with every vaccinated person.”

Fauci reinforced that same illusion on 16 May 2021 when he appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation, he declared that when someone gets vaccinated, “you become a dead end to the virus… the virus is not going to go anywhere.”

Those assurances carried devastating real-world consequences. They built false expectations, drove individual medical choices, and later became the moral rationale for aggressive mandates that forced millions to choose between an injection and their livelihood.

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This weekend CNN anchor Dana Bash invited Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. onto State of the Union to discuss vaccines, public health and America’s preparedness for the next pandemic.

The conversation quickly settled into familiar territory.

Bash accused Kennedy of spreading vaccine misinformation, defended established public health positions and appealed repeatedly to scientific consensus.

Kennedy pushed back. If Bash wanted to invoke “the science,” he expected her to debate it. Whenever she offered a broad assertion, he returned to the same demand. “Cite me the study.”

The exchange exposed a fundamental weakness in modern health reporting.

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Anthony Fauci walked into Capitol Hill with something highly unusual for a congressional witness. A sweeping pre-emptive presidential pardon from former President Joe Biden covering more than a decade of his federal conduct.

He arrived legally shielded from federal prosecution for offences covered by that pardon.

But over the next three or so hours, the former face of America’s pandemic response refused to answer every substantive question senators put to him.

Instead, he repeated the same prepared response 111 times.

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

He refused to explain his private diaries, defend his pandemic decisions or address US-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

By the end of the hearing, that single sentence had become the story everyone was talking about.

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It was only last year that Nobel laureate Drew Weissman spoke with complete confidence about the mRNA technology he helped create.

When asked whether the genetic material or lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used in Covid-19 vaccines could persist in the body or spread far beyond the injection site, his answer was unequivocal.

“It is absolutely impossible….. The RNA is gone in days,” said Weissman, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for co-inventing the technology

But four years earlier, behind closed doors, his message was very different.

Newly released documents made public by Senator Rand Paul reveal that Weissman privately alerted Anthony Fauci to some concerning findings from his own laboratory.

Those findings triggered discussions among some of the NIH’s most senior vaccine scientists before eventually finding their way into Fauci’s personal diary.

Still emerging technology

When the pandemic hit, mRNA vaccines were still an emerging technology. Just two years prior, Weissman and his colleagues published a review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

While praising the technology’s potential, they highlighted unresolved hurdles—including RNA instability, unwanted immune reactions, and the challenge of getting genetic material into the right cells.

Though initial animal studies showed promise, early human trials yielded modest results, leading the authors to urge “cautious expectations.”

Significant questions also remained around safety of mRNA vaccines during pregnancy, as pregnant women were excluded from the pivotal Pfizer and Moderna trials.

Regulators had to rely on animal reproductive data while human data accumulated post-rollout.

It was against this backdrop that Weissman reached out directly to Fauci.

Fauci alerted to new data

On 8 February 2021, Weissman emailed Fauci.

“I wanted to alert you to some new data we generated.”

Weissman reported that when injected into pregnant mice, mRNA-LNPs crossed the placenta and entered the foetus, generating viral proteins and triggering an immune response in the amniotic fluid.

In non-pregnant mice, the LNPs accumulated in the uterus and ovaries.

While these initial experiments used intravenous (IV) delivery at doses roughly 100 times higher than a standard vaccine, they aligned with broader research.

As early as 2013, French scientists had shown that lipid nanoparticles could accumulate in organs such as the ovaries, highlighting the need to understand how different delivery methods behave inside the body.

This was also reflected in regulatory documents for Covid-19 vaccine pre-clinical studies, which showed that mRNA lipid nanoparticles accumulated in organs, including the ovaries.

Weissman wanted to test a more clinically relevant scenario, so he planned to repeat the study using intramuscular (IM) injections, matching standard vaccination practices.

“We are waiting to release the findings until these studies are completed,” Weissman told Fauci, noting he had already alerted the FDA, Moderna, BioNTech/Pfizer, and DARPA.

Fauci replied that evening.

“It would be interesting to see what human dose levels given IM do.”

Three weeks later, on 1 March 2021, Weissman emailed back with a confidential report attached.

“Here is the human dose IM studies in pregnant mice. We still have some concern over the data,” he wrote.

Within the hour, Fauci forwarded the report to Dr John Mascola, director of the NIH Vaccine Research Centre, writing, “Let us discuss.”

Mascola quickly circulated the report to his senior leadership team for review.

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With Senator Rand Paul releasing over 1,000 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private diary, readers are getting an unprecedented look behind the curtain.

Many might expect the private reflections of the nation’s most influential public health official to be dominated by the scientific and public health challenges confronting the country. Instead, something else becomes evident.

Amid meetings, phone calls and official duties, Fauci repeatedly paused to catalogue glowing newspaper profiles, television appearances, and celebrity praise.

The pattern began on 20 January 2020, when television host Lou Dobbs called to say that President Trump would soon be in touch. Dobbs told Fauci he had described him to the president as the “smartest person” he knew and urged Trump to speak with him.

Days later, Fauci recorded that the White House had chosen him—rather than CDC Director Robert Redfield—to serve as the administration’s primary spokesperson.

“Bob Redfield just does not come across very well,” he wrote, explaining that Redfield rambled too much, so instead “they are putting me out on all the requests.”

The decision marked a turning point.

Fauci recorded the moment President Trump told him, “Anthony, you are really a famous guy,” before spending the next 20 minutes asking him questions.

Fauci wrote that he was “surprised and very pleased,” adding that those present “were clearly stunned and impressed.”

“All my friends kept saying I was a national hero,” wrote Fauci. Members of Congress told him they felt “safe in [his] arms.”

By late March—as the nation entered historic lockdowns and the economy ground to a halt—Fauci boasted that the “press is going wild with me.”

His diary increasingly resembled a scrapbook of his own celebrity.

He saved clippings about his childhood, his high-school basketball career and his personal life. He documented a petition to make him “Sexiest Man Alive” and even kept stories about “grandmothers who have crushes on me.”

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Anthony Fauci returns to Capitol Hill on July 29 to face fresh questions about the origins of Covid-19 and his role in the pandemic.

For years, Fauci has denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan and repeatedly claimed not to recall critical early decisions.

During his January 2024 interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, lawmakers counted over 100 instances where he answered, “I don’t recall.”

Now, Senator Rand Paul has released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's private diary, spanning from December 2019 until his retirement at the end of 2022.

Written contemporaneously and never intended for public release, the pages detail key meetings, phone calls, scientific debates, and personal observations as the crisis unfolded.

For the first time, Fauci’s public narrative can be measured directly against his private record.

The initial warning

By late January 2020, the official explanation for the outbreak was already collapsing behind closed doors.

On January 26, Fauci recorded that epidemiological and genomic data indicated the earliest infections occurred weeks before the cluster at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market.

His takeaway was unambiguous: “The market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”

That was a remarkable observation. The seafood market was central to the official outbreak narrative. If it was merely an amplifier, the virus had to have originated elsewhere.

Five days later, on January 31, Jeremy Farrar telephoned Fauci after consulting scientists Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, and Bob Garry about the newly sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genome.

Fauci noted that the scientists found the genome “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” focusing specifically on the virus’s furin cleavage site, which “could not have occurred naturally.”

He then noted:

“They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab—the former being the most likely.”

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For decades, the vitamin K injection has been one of the most routine procedures in newborn care. It is given shortly after birth to protect against a rare but potentially serious bleeding disorder.

Few parents questioned the practice, but that is changing. Hospitals across the United States report that more parents are declining the injection.

A national study of more than 5 million births found that the proportion of newborns not receiving the vitamin K injection rose from 2.9% in 2017 to 5.2% in 2024.

Last month, Senator Angela Alsobrooks and Representative Kim Schrier urged Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya to begin tracking vitamin K refusal rates nationally, along with cases of vitamin K deficiency bleeding and associated deaths.

The rise in refusals has largely been attributed to “misinformation.” But that explanation is too simplistic.

Many parents simply want to know exactly what product is being offered to their newborn, what alternatives exist, why recommendations differ between countries, and what evidence supports the specific product they are being asked to accept.

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Twenty years ago, a paper published in JAMA changed the way doctors thought about antidepressant use during pregnancy.

The study concluded that women who discontinued the medication during pregnancy were five times more likely to relapse into major depression than those who remained on the medication. It quickly became one of the most influential papers in perinatal psychiatry.

Its findings were incorporated into clinical guidelines, cited by regulators, and eventually referenced in FDA prescribing information.

For many clinicians, it became the definitive evidence that discontinuing SSRIs during pregnancy carried a substantial risk of depressive relapse.

At the time, maternal-foetal medicine specialist Dr Adam Urato noticed something was missing from the study’s disclosures.

He recognised that many of the authors’ financial relationships with manufacturers of antidepressants had not been disclosed.

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This week, Dr Erica Schwartz appeared before the Senate HELP Committee to make her case for leading the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

But before the nominee had answered a single question, the terms of her confirmation had already been laid down.

HELP Committee chairman Bill Cassidy wasted no time.

“A lot of this conversation for me is going to revolve around vaccines,” he announced. “Vaccines should be settled.”

He blamed “a flurry of misinformation” around immunisation, saying some people cast doubt on mRNA vaccines “for no other reason than people don’t understand them.”

Mothers and fathers, he said, had become “confused as to whether vaccines are safe to give their children.” The result was thousands of measles infections, with children hospitalised or dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Then came the ultimatum.

“Vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and effective,” Cassidy declared. “Study after study shows they do not cause autism.”

“Any equivocation on these facts,” he warned Schwartz, “and I shall not be able to support your nomination.”

Only then did the questioning begin.

Confirmation hearings are meant to test a nominee’s judgment, independence and fitness to lead. Instead, Cassidy announced the conclusions he expected Schwartz to affirm before she had given a single substantive answer.

From the outset, it was clear there was no room for dissent.

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Recently, I wrote about how blood pressure guidelines have steadily shifted lower. Treatment thresholds fell, risk calculators expanded, and far more people now start medication years before they develop any symptoms.

After that piece, several clinicians contacted me with a different concern. This time, they weren’t worried about blood pressure being too high. They were worried about it being pushed too low.

What are the harms of lowering blood pressure too much in older people?

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