The Swamp Strikes Back
Fauci Jr. inherits the throne of Gain-of-Function
From Alaskan corpses to COVID cover-ups
In 2006, Anthony Fauci promoted the gain-of-function research of a little-known scientist named Jeffrey Taubenberger. His colleagues dug up frozen bodies from the Alaskan permafrost, resurrected the 1918 flu virus that killed 50 million people, and serially passaged it in ferrets at the Rocky Mountain Lab.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Taubenberger was already part of the lab leak cover-up club, alongside Anthony S Fauci (ASF), his ghostwriter David Morens, and Peter Daszak.
Together, they published a February 2020 NEJM article assuring the world: “Of course, scientists tell us that SARS-CoV-2 did not escape from a jar.” Just days earlier, Fauci was told by a group of evolutionary virologists that “we find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
It was odd, then, when Taubenberger was tapped in April 2025 to replace Fauci’s female successor at NIAID. NIH’s own Twitter account offered a clue. They claimed that the “ideological” female whistleblower, who was fired to make room for Taubenberger, had “unfounded accusations.”
Deputy Director Dr. Matt Memoli is a champion of evidence-based science — full stop. As a vaccine and respiratory virus researcher with more than 20 years of experience, his record is unassailable. Ideological attacks and unfounded accusations have no place in science — or NIH.
A New York Times whistleblower piece on Matt Memoli — Jay Bhattacharya’s deputy at NIH — linked to three articles. All the articles show that Memoli promoted his longtime co-author, Taubenberger, for an old-school flu vaccine worth hundreds of millions.
Memoli and Taubenberger have co-authored at least a dozen papers on influenza, human challenge trials, and universal vaccine work. But unlike Fauci and the old NIH regime, Memoli wasn’t a fan of the new mRNA platforms. Back in 2021, he openly refused the COVID vaccination, clashing with his then-boss, Fauci.
Dr. Memoli had drawn attention in 2021 for clashing over vaccine mandates with Dr. Fauci, his boss at the time. He said then that he was declining to be vaccinated against Covid.
Bhattacharya and RFK Jr., now running HHS, clearly liked Memoli’s anti-mRNA streak. They promoted him to serve as acting director until Bhattacharya’s Senate confirmation in April.
In January 2025, the Trump administration plucked Dr. Memoli out of the middle rungs of the N.I.H. to make him the agency’s acting director. He became its second-in-command after Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Senate-confirmed director, began his tenure in April.
Memoli’s last move in March before Bhattacharya took over in April? He fired Jeanne Marrazzo — Fauci’s short-lived successor at NIAID — days before Bhattacharya arrived, prompting her whistleblower complaint.
The complaints were filed by Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who until the end of March had directed the NIAID, the institute previously run by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci
That cleared the vaccine runway for Taubenberger, but why him? Follow the money.
Even as it cut some (mRNA) vaccine research, the complaints said, the health department (BARDA which is DARPA for NIH) awarded $500 million in May to a universal vaccine project that many scientists said relied on badly outdated technology. Dr. Memoli, a flu expert who had previously worked on the project, was one of the award’s chief recipients.
The Wall Street Journal story headline:
Memoli and Taubenberger are Gain-of-Function buddies and mentioned several times in the Wall Street Journal article:
The Generation Gold Standard project includes research on a “universal” flu vaccine co-developed by Dr. Matthew Memoli, who was handpicked by the Trump administration this year as acting director of NIH and now serves as its principal deputy director, and Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, who was selected in April to be acting director of NIH’s sprawling infectious-diseases institute…
Memoli and Taubenberger, who are senior scientists on the preliminary safety study, recorded mild side effects including fever, headaches and pain at the injection site…
Former and current HHS officials, who requested anonymity, told the Journal they are startled by the size of the award.
NIH labs are typically funded by their respective institutes with money appropriated by Congress. For fiscal year 2023, NIAID, where Memoli and Taubenberger conduct their research, had $856 million budgeted for more than 120 staff scientists.
A $500 million transfer “seems like an astronomical number,” said Rick Bright, a flu- vaccine expert and former BARDA director who left in 2020 after clashing with HHS leadership.
Before becoming health secretary, Kennedy in public comments and on social media accused NIH-funded scientists of profiting off inventions and promised to rid health agencies of conflicts of interest. HHS said in a statement that the universal platform is fully government owned and thus free “from commercial conflicts of interest.”
HHS insisted there were no conflicts since the platform was “government-owned,” but Memoli and Taubenberger owned it.
How the Washington D.C. swamp resurrected its own
As STAT reported, the grant skipped peer review entirely because the recipients were NIH insiders. One scientist dryly called it “incestuous.”
A number of scientists also questioned the way the funding was awarded. Because the project is led by in-house scientists — one who is now the NIH’s principal deputy director, Matthew Memoli, the other his frequent co-author and now acting director of the NIAID, Jeffery Taubenberger — it did not have to go through the lengthy and rigorous peer-reviewed appraisal process that scientists at academic institutions must endure when they are seeking NIH funding. “It’s really quite incestuous,” one scientist noted…
In the early days of vaccine production, making vaccines using whole killed viruses was common; early flu vaccines were made this way…
In the statement announcing the flu vaccine, Bhattacharya called it a “paradigm shift.” But the inactivated vaccine tech is retro — killed-virus style, more 1950s than 2025. This approach motivates virologists like Taubenberger to dig up century-old corpses from the frozen tundra, isolate the flu virus that killed millions, and passaged the live virus in ferrets at Rocky Mountain Lab. Ironically, this approach aligns more closely with GoF than the newer mRNA vaccines.
SARS-CoV-2 itself is a GoF vaccine created in Rocky Mountain Lab. And the track record isn’t great: Taubenberger’s 2025 universal coronavirus vaccine trial at Rocky Mountain Lab had nearly half the lab mice dead within days. Soon, we will all be dead with Taubenberger in control of $6 billion of dual-use funds at NIAID.
Fauci and Francis Collins 2.0
Fauci and Francis Collins infamously wrote: A flu virus risk worth taking. They defended the ferret transmission studies to “fill important gaps in knowledge.” That quest for knowledge led to COVID-19, lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, and, rightfully, people like Bhattacharya and RFK Jr. taking over.
Bhattacharya and RFK Jr. could have followed Trump’s political playbook that landed them their jobs. Install a renegade like Richard Ebright — a Rutgers biosecurity hawk hated by virologists — and end risky GoF research. Instead, Fauci exits. Taubenberger enters. Memoli cashes in. And $500 million in public money flows into a “paradigm shift” that looks more like a family racket.
Most people had never heard of Jeffrey Taubenberger until Jay Bhattacharya featured him on his new NIH podcast. They are sitting in Francis Collins' old office, who called Bhattacharya a “fringe” scientist for questioning the lockdowns.
Bhattacharya gushed about Taubenberger’s research, who resurrected and serially passaged the 1918 flu virus. Bhattacharya said it was “really cool to be able to see what the biological entity was that caused such devastation in 1918.”
A century later, COVID-19 brought similar devastation, and a familiar cast of scientists covered it up. In the email below, they even discuss Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak’s R01 NIAID grant — the one that bankrolled DARPA’s shelved Defuse proposal.
By July 2025, NIH itself admitted in a Twitter post that Taubenberger, now head of NIAID, had underreported a list of high-risk gain-of-function projects to the White House — but shifted the blame to unnamed “NIAID staff.” A previous Substack post showed that “NIH staff” kept the GoF inventory.
In August, Bhattacharya went into damage control mode, tweeting at lab leakers: “I have confidence that Dr. Taubenberger is committed to biosafety, strict prohibition of dangerous gain of function work, and a new direction for NIAID. In this case, past associations do not indicate future inclinations.”
NIH piled on with its own spin, assuring the public that Taubenberger “has nothing to do with GoF policy” — which is Washington-speak for he’s in charge, but we’d rather you didn’t notice.
Finally, regarding Dr. Taubenberger: he plays no role in directing GoF policy, which, as emphasized previously, is led by OSTP—not NIH. Likewise, he has never reported directly to Dr. Fauci and does not oversee GoF efforts within the Office of the NIH Director. In fact, Dr. Taubenberger has consistently expressed strong support for the Executive Order.
Unlike Memoli, Taubenberger may not have reported directly to Fauci. But Fauci pulled them out of obscurity. He handed them the license to resurrect a 1918 virus that had killed more people than World War 1.
Ironically, Taubenberger and Fauci determined that resurrection of the 1918 flu wasn’t GoF because it didn’t possess a furin cleavage site like SARS-CoV-2.
Is Jay in over his head?
The NIH is so large that it has created its own commercial conflicts of interest. A recent New York Times article on Jay Bhattacharya noted:
Perhaps the best way to look at the N.I.H. is as a small country. It’s been around since 1887 and has a budget of $48 billion, larger than the defense budget of Taiwan or the entire GDP of Iceland. It has a federalized structure for its dozens of states.
It even has a stable elite (lab scientists at prestige universities), an insecure elite (grad students and flyover-state scientists), a working class that feels unrepresented (clinicians), and a shadow elite some suspect of really pulling the levers (pharma). It has a mythology of its past glories. It’s anxious that greatness now lies behind it.
Regarding Bhattacharya’s anti-lockdown example, which led Collins to call him a “fringe” scientist:
To Dr. Bhattacharya, as he said in a 2023 interview, this shows that “We could’ve avoided all the suffering caused by the lockdowns: the closed businesses, the unemployment, all of that.” And it was all possible because Swedes “trust Swedish public health because they were honest about their mistakes, honest about their reasoning.”
I don’t think he has either part of this story right. When you look at the observable behavior of Swedes during Covid, you see something different. In Stockholm, the number of trips on the train and tram taken in April 2020 was 60 percent below pre-pandemic levels. A year later, it was still depressed by 50 percent. A comprehensive economic analysis found that the pandemic induced a “drastic economic recession” in Sweden, including a 48 percent drop in hotel and restaurant sales in the initial months, and unemployment at the highest level since the Great Recession, persisting into late 2021.
Sweden’s behavior was more like America’s than different. For all it got right, it did not achieve the core goal of the Great Barrington Declaration — focusing protection on the vulnerable minority, while society broadly carried on normally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/opinion/jay-bhattacharya-nih.html
Update on ending animal testing?
“The NIH’s rhetoric about reducing animal testing doesn’t match reality,” said Justin Goodman of White Coat Waste, an organization that has described the Trump Administration’s commitment to drastically reduce animal testing as a “watershed moment” in its fight to end the practice.
One of the new projects is a kidney transplant study that will use about 99 monkeys at a cost of about $10,000 each, bought from a South Carolina primate farm…
The project got $1.4 million in July from NIAID. The study is slated to receive $10.1 million through 2030, according to funding documents.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/animal-rights-groups-trump-administration-monkeys-medical-research/
The NIH has granted more than $20 million of funds for new dog studies despite the agency’s stated intent to phase out funding for animal testing models.
Bhattacharya’s response:
Update on foreign bats bred in America
The NIH awarded $2 million last week to help Colorado State University finish the $12 million Chinese bat breeding lab for Vincent Munster at RML. This bad bat news came from Justin Goodman, who has been fighting the good fight. Goodman noted that Bhattacharya was well aware of the project, but the D.C. Swamp always wins.
Goodman calls PETA a “PR arm of the NIH because a friend of theirs got elevated into leadership.”
Fauci deleted emails
The RFK Jr. and Bhattacharya regimes have been more transparent in sharing their thoughts than their predecessors. According to Senator Rand Paul, they helped gain access to some incriminating emails from Fauci.
Kim Iversen wants more:
Senator Rand Paul thinks he has enough to convict Fauci for destroying records:
Vincent Munster RML emails
Munster calls Fauci the “supreme commander.” Fort Detrick requested his permission to work on coronaviruses. He shared tips on aerosolizing agents.
The 2018 Baric-Munster bat paper was actually based on a 2016 experiment, so this bat vaccine idea was well-developed. They also worked on an unpublished “MERS-like” chimera with a furin cleavage site (e.g. HKU4). The shipment of novel chimeras was simply 10-14 tubes in the mail from North Carolina to Montana.
Munster also called the work of an evolutionary virologist, who later flagged the SARS2 genome as engineered, a whole load of bullshit. When those engineering rumors reached Baric and Munster’s inbox, Munster said, “And the fun begins.”
Munster and his DARPA postdoc, Michael Letko, famously omitted the furin cleavage site from their early pandemic paper. A Nature reviewer asked why, and Munster replied, “This is indeed a very interesting question...”
Racaniello from TWIV, who asked the engineering question above, awkwardly discovered the omission himself.
A new USAID Predict project at the CDC?
Buried in the WSJ Oped was a reference to more risky virus hunting.
The CDC also now operates in 63 countries, monitoring biothreats before they reach our shores. Its Biothreat Radar Detection System—an advanced early-detection tool—can spot pathogens like H5N1 or MERS early enough to prevent catastrophe.
RFK Jr’s lab leak theory
If your name is on a $100 million biolab at the University of North Carolina, would you “share” your valuable technology with the Chinese? Would you teach them how to do it? Would you even allow them to copy it? Well, that is what RFK Jr claims.
RFK Jr mentioned Ben Hu of the Wuhan Institute of Virology a dozen times. According to DARPA Defuse, Ben Hu earns $10.95/hour, and Zhengli Shi earns $25/hour. But somehow the Chinese conspired to steal $100 million in biotech from Baric and blow up the world!
Baric said he kept his methods “obscure” from the Chinese. And his No See’m technology isn’t for bioweapons; he used it for animal vaccines like SARS-CoV-2. He was hiding the engineering scars from the animal’s immune system, not us lab leak researchers. But none of this is politically popular. What is good politics? Confuse a Baric-made vaccine for a Chinese-made bioweapon.
Trump on bioweapons at the UN
Trump announces a new verification system for the Biological Weapons Convention, utilizing AI.
AI, Reddit, and lab leak
AI uses Reddit to train its models, so both have avoided lab leak theories —until now?
The sooner the American public realises that Bobby is fundamentally a hardcore politician and, at his core, a wannabe presidential aspirant, the better it will be for everyone. Until then, there will be many peculiar selections for some very sensitive posts. Most Americans are too gullible to figure out what actually is going on and, worse, what shall unfold in the future.
Nothing will ever come out of the JFK, RFK, or MLK files. Absolutely nothing will ever be revealed about the contents of the Epstein files or, for that matter, the Diddy shenanigans.
The same will happen with the in-your-face, in-broad-daylight slaughter of the young Evangelical, who finally began to realise the truth of what was occurring in the Middle East.
It's a pretty mean world.
All said and done, a great article.