by Sharon Rondeau
(Jun. 13, 2024) — In an interview on “The Highwire” Thursday afternoon hosted by founder Del Bigtree, Dr. Robert Malone, MD, a pioneer of mRNA technology and outspoken critic of the U.S. government’s COVID-19 mandates, discussed a congressional report released Tuesday revealing that, contrary to testimony made to Congress by former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public-health officials over the last several years, gain-of-function research has long been conducted by the U.S. government funded by taxpayers.
“Since October 2022, the Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Republican
Members (E&C or the Committee) have been investigating a research project on MPXV, a
virus that causes mpox (formerly known as “monkeypox”), planned and/or conducted at the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),” the Committee wrote in the report’s executive summary on page 3. “Under Rule X clause 1(f) of the U.S. House of Representatives, E&C is the committee with jurisdiction over public health agencies, including NIAID’s parent agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and federal biomedical research. The Committee has a long history of conducting oversight of federally funded virology research, including investigating accidents at high-containment laboratories, and examining federal policies related to biosecurity, biosafety, and potentially risky experiments” (footnote omitted).
“A September 15, 2022, Science magazine article on MPXV included an interview with
Dr. Bernard Moss, a preeminent pox virologist who has worked for decades at NIAID and is
a NIH Distinguished Investigator,” the report continues. “In the interview, Dr. Moss noted he and his colleagues had swapped dozens of genes from the much more transmissible, but less deadly, clade II MPXV into the more deadly clade I MPXV. The article stated that the Moss team was ‘planning to try the opposite, endowing clade II virus with genes from its deadlier relative.’ The proposal to transfer genes from the deadlier clade I into the more transmissible clade II alarmed some scientists who believed a more potent version of the mpox outbreak strain could spark an epidemic that would be substantially more lethal” (footnotes omitted).
“This is an arrogant, entitled culture” immersed in a perceived “right” to carry on the research, Malone, once a government contractor himself, told Bigtree.
In the fall of 2014, the U.S. government reportedly “paused” its funding of gain-of-function experiments, but in late 2017, then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis S. Collins restored it.
Collins retired from his NIH post in late 2021. A contemporaneous NPR article quoting a media spokeswoman at the Federation of American Societies For Experimental Biology reported Collins possessed the ability “‘to clearly explain what NIH is doing’ to lawmakers.”
Last month an NIH official “admitted to Congress…that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic,” the New York Post reported.
When testifying to Congress on multiple occasions, however, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who retired in 2022 and testified June 3, firmly denied the U.S. government’s funding of gain-of-function research.
In May 2021, Collins testified Wuhan scientists “were not approved by NIH for doing gain of function research” but that other sources of funding could have supported it.
As a result of the committee’s report, Malone on Thursday published a Substack titled, “Last Straw: NIAID Must Be Shut Down” fashioned as “a plea to President Trump.”
“Dr. Bernard Moss, the scientist at the heart of this controversy, has not been subpoenaed, nor has his scientific staff that we know of,” Malone wrote in his column. “There is no question that gain-of-function work was performed, and relatively recently, too. The only question is how far did these experiments go.”
Toward the conclusion of the interview Bigtree revealed Malone served as “an expert witness” for the film “Protocol 7” directed by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a former UK-based gastrointestinal surgeon ostracized from the medical community and blamed for nationally-declining childhood vaccinations after declaring a link between MMR vaccines and autism.
Wakefield directed and co-wrote the 2016 film, Vaxxed, with Bigtree the co-writer.
Malone, too, has been demonized by many in the medical community and the media who contend he is a charlatan given his background in developing the mRNA platform utilized in the COVID-19 “vaccines” and former association with an NIH committee.
In his defense, Malone wrote in his biography, “Because of my speaking out about the safety issues of the ‘vaccines’ and being an advocate for multi-drug, early treatment for COVID-19, government, media and big tech have done everything in their power to censor and defame me and my work…If they can remove my voice, my experience, my expertise – they win…”
Editor’s Note: Bigtree is serving as communications director for the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.