The Pro-Pandemic Administration
The Trump regime is spreading a noxious form of anti-science miasma
“The diseases are nearly all new,” the mysterious doctor says. “They are inventions of my own, and some of them are infinitely more deadly than any disease known to the medical profession.”
Vial 17 contains an adulterated Typhoid Fever, which could kill the host in a mere 36 hours. Tube 31 is an older specimen, something akin to rabies but with a host of other nasty afflictions: It “would certainly be very efficacious, should it ever become epidemic,” the scientist remarks.
And then there is the glass container carrying The Purple Death: “The king of all diseases.” Remarkably infectious, it kills in just 30 minutes.
In William L. Alden’s The Purple Death1, this mad scientist has concocted these novel afflictions as a means to enact Europe-wide depopulation — the only way to cure poverty, he believes.
This hokey early science fiction tale was published in 1895, just five years after La Grippe (also known as the Russian or Asiatic Flu, depending on your vantage point) killed some million people worldwide.
There was then, of course, all manner of convoluted explanations of the pandemic’s supernatural origins just as there were quack remedies on how it might be cured. Alden’s short story certainly didn’t birth the idea that these kinds of pestilence could be blamed on other humans — the Jews had been the target of many an obscene conspiracy theory for centuries, at that point. (Dispatch #113) Nor was it the first time an author conjured fears of biological warfare: A few years prior, authors had imagined the possibility of an attack using existing agents, like Typhoid.
But Alden’s short story was, best I can tell, the first time an author imagined men getting into the business of designing novel viruses, particularly as an act of bioterrorism. (Robert Potter’s The Germ Growers imagined this kind of genetic engineering three years earlier — but his villains were alien.) And it’s an idea that hasn’t left us since.
From HIV to SARS (Dispatch #59), humans have become accustomed to accusing each other of orchestrating these ailments. The story of the man-made pandemic has become perhaps the ultimate genre of horror. It combines our fear of the unknown, our fear of science, our fear of each other, and fears of our own bodies — blending them into something altogether terrifying. Like a bioweapon itself, this fear is a chimera.
In 1920, the Arizona Republic received a letter warning about a “purple death” afflicting the residents of the Fort Apache Indigenous reservation. “The victim has three chills and falls over dead.”2
“The Indian agency does not seem to want publicity but I think that something should be done,” the writer warned. “Four people are dying a week.”
Other papers began receiving inquiries as to why they “had not published anything about the deaths, on the Fort Apache reservation, from the ‘Purple Death.’” Rumors of this “mysterious malady” and its “epidemic of deaths” evolved to claim that “the deceased at once turns a vivid purple.”
One paper took the trouble to actually ask The Fort Apache reservation, which replied promptly: “This seems to be purely a hoax. There is no such disease prevalent.”3 The rumor died there.
Today, however, the rumor won’t die. Worse yet, it has infected the U.S. government. Fears, genuine and invented, of bioweapons have become a new core tenet of the MAGA/MAHA movements. That’s very bad.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: How Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. created a boogeyman of science, eviscerated an invaluable system of global public health, and hunted down the scientists defending us against the world’s worst bioterrorist: Mother Nature.
In late May, the White House promulgated 100 pages of proposed regulations on how government grants are to be awarded.
Under this new scheme, political staff will have absolute control over which research and what projects deserve funding. “Unlawful DEI practices” are out, “various anti-American ideologies” will no longer get cash, and “AI-powered social media censorship tools” will be ineligible. And it is Donald Trump’s stooges who will decide what constitutes a “non-replicable and highly misleading stud[y].”
This is necessary, the regulations explain, because “far-left activists” had hijacked too much government work, including the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). What began as a way of combating HIV/AIDS in Africa had become, the administration screeched, a vehicle “to promote abortion and gender ideology.” Too much money had gone to NGOs, not enough to “direct humanitarian aid.”
Perhaps the most egregious use of these federal dollars, it reads, was funding given to “labs engaged in gain-of-function research.” The U.S. government, they argue, had been funding the development of bioweapons — which had been used on the American people.
And so this administration’s rotten mandarins are now in charge of determining whether grants “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities,” ensuring that they pursue no “racial preferences” or support for “illegal immigration,” nor that they deny “the sex binary in humans.” And, finally, that these projects don’t “compromise public safety or promote anti-American values” — as defined by the administration, of course.
The regulations are just one facet of a broader assault by Washington on the scientific and public health establishment. It will be one of the most devastating.
As scientific funding becomes more nakedly political, it is also being decimated across the board. The National Science Foundation is facing a 55% budget cut. One of the most drastic cuts comes to the Foundation’s biological sciences division: It is being slashed by some 75% over two years prior.
About $5 billion is being cut from the National Institutes of Health, with the biggest hit being made to Anthony Fauci’s former agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). That Institute is facing a 27% cut, with fully $1.2 billion dollars in research grant money being taken off the table.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, one of the most important agencies supporting research and development of critical medical countermeasures, is facing nearly $400 million in cuts — about a third of its budget. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon agency which supports frontline measures against naturally-occurring pathogens (Dispatch #127), is facing a 25% cut.
The funding cuts come with an abrupt re-orientation towards this administration’s warped priorities. Gone is NIAID’s long-standing mandate of pandemic prevention and preparedness: Now, the agency is more concerned with “advancing food allergy research.”
The Fogarty International Center’s modest $95 million budget is being eliminated entirely. That Center spearheaded global partnerships to study the Zika virus in Brazil, track and combat early Ebola outbreaks, study HIV/AIDS trends in sub-Saharan Africa, and study strains of COVID-19 percolating in southeast Asia.
This Spring, the Fogarty International Center fêted Catherine Koofhethile, a Botswanan HIV researcher who had been granted a five-year fellowship with the center in 2020. With that support, she was able to cover salaries for her team and pay a cohort of HIV-positive teens to participate in a longitudinal study on anti-retroviral treatment. Koofhethile’s work is getting humanity meaningfully closer to curing HIV. She was awarded a grant from the Center in 2024 to continue her work — while it is supposed to run until 2029, her funding will cease this August.
That story is being repeated again and again, from the most cutting-edge research to basic emergency healthcare. As Christian Walzer, Executive Director of Health at the Wildlife Conservation Society, explained to me recently:
Wazler: Look at the ongoing Ebola virus strain outbreak at the moment in Central Africa. One thing that’s clear response is slow because the entire fragile healthcare network that existed there — based mostly on HIV and tuberculosis investments — is gone.
And not only is the infrastructure gone but, most importantly — and this is the information we’re getting directly from our colleagues out of the Congo Basin — is that the workforce is gone. All these people have been laid of,f and now that workforce is missing to help with contact tracing, diagnostics, and, obviously, with treatment and so on. So the real world impact is that this is going to cause a lot of suffering and death in the end.
Look anywhere in the U.S. government and you can find evidence that its commitment to public health, global health, and pandemic preparedness has been absolutely shredded. USAID, and all the local medical staff and equipment it funded, is gone. The recommended vaccine schedule has been updated to remove key childhood immunizations, and more changes are likely to come. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the hunt to find the real cause of our unwellness, and he won’t stop until he justifies his chosen rationale.
There’s no denying the administration’s well-known and obsessive distrust of science and expertise. But that, alone, doesn’t explain this crusade to defund the very fields of study which keep us from getting sick in the first place.
As I’ve argued before (Dispatch #142), the most powerful men in America genuinely believe — or, at least, pretend to believe — that the COVID-19 pandemic was cooked up by the U.S. scientific establishment. And now they’re on a revenge kick.
Thanks to them, the next pandemic is inching closer.
In late January, Vincent Munster and Claude Kwe stepped off their flight and into the Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
The pair are colleagues at NIAID, and were part of a frontline army of government scientists who travel the world, trying to understand novel pathogens in hopes of preventing their spread. Munster and Kwe are particularly interested in viruses spreading in central Africa, including Ebola and Nipah virus. This time, they had been in the Republic of Congo, working with local scientists to study a new strain of Mpox: A different strain than the one which spread around the globe in 2022, one that could prove more dangerous.
In the airport, Kwe was interviewed by Customs and Border Patrol officers — who said they observed “nervous behavior” from the Cameroonian national. They ordered Kwe to collect his luggage and report to secondary screening, where Munster joined them.
I have no idea if those CBP agents were on the lookout for Munster. If not, it was one hell of a coincidence. Munster is a renowned virologist who worked under Ron Fouchier, one of the pioneers of virological gain-of-function research. And, as chief of the Virus Ecology Unit at the highly-secured Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Munster worked on Project DEFUSE.
Fouchier’s work and the grant proposal for Project DEFUSE are core pieces of a sprawling conspiracy theory about the origin of COVID-19. They are also, in the real world, a fascinating story about the people who tried to prevent the pandemic. If you believe the former theory, you think Munster is a killer. If you believe the latter, he’s something of a hero.
More than two decades ago, a man named Peter Daszak came to believe that humanity was facing an enormous risk. The SARS pandemic had been a terrifying epidemic — but that virus had come and gone relatively quickly, its damage contained. Daszak was convinced the next one could be much worse.
So, along with his colleagues at the EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO which studies animal-born illnesses of which he was president; the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and NIAID, he sought $14 million to fund his work “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” Over the years, that work would pull in Munster and a variety of other experts.
“We first started working in China back in 2003, after SARS emerged,” Daszak told me recently. “We wanted to know where SARS came from. We knew it came out of the market [in Guangzhou] because the first cases were in wildlife markets, but we wanted to know, well, where in China did it originate? Which animal did it really come from, and how did it get there?”
Others seemed keen to just forget about this epidemic soon after it ended. Some even speculated that the epidemic may have been caused by Chinese bioweapons research.
“When we published our paper in Science in 20054, we got letters from someone who believed [SARS] came from outer space,” Daszak laughs.
But Daszak and his colleagues kept hunting, and it led to an extraordinary discovery: A massive cave system in Yunnan, in southern China, full of horseshoe bats. There, they found thousands, maybe millions, of strains of coronavirus percolating.
This cave system hadn’t just given us SARS, but it had produced another coronavirus, which had jumped through camels: MERS. They had discovered a natural bioweapons lab: Nature was furiously testing different strains, and some fraction of them would be infectious to humans — and some could be incredibly deadly.
There was no way to collect and study every single strain jumping between bats in those caves. Even if they could, it wouldn’t do much good: Those viruses would need to go through all manner of mutations and adaptations before they could infect and harm humans. So many of the scientists working on these viruses began trying to mimic those kinds of genetic changes in a lab. They spliced genes, trying to understand how SARS had adapted the spike protein that made it so dangerous to humans. They used lab animals to create the conditions for how the viruses may spread, evolve, and ultimately spill over through animal-human contact.
This is gain-of-function5 research: Introducing variables to a virus until it changes and adapts, to observe the effects. Fouchier was one of the pioneers of this research: His work had proved that H5N1, bird flu, was dangerous close to cause human-to-human transmission. His breakthrough had prompted something of a panic: The U.S. government had paused funding for this kind of research while it devised new safeguards.
By the time Daszak and the researchers in Wuhan were performing these experiments, they were doing so in the highest-security labs, with oversight from both the U.S. and Chinese governments, and they explained it all in published papers. This work was enormously valuable. They created a massive library of these coronaviruses, and they came to better understand how their receptors attached to cells in our respiratory tract. They identified these coronaviruses as “a clear and present danger to our biosafety and public health.”6
Project DEFUSE was their proposal to combine virological experiments with machine-learning systems to try and map out how the next pandemic may emerge. Their grant application was, ultimately, rejected.
Still, their other work saved millions of lives. When COVID-19 hit, we were able to produce diagnostic tests, antibody therapies, and vaccines as quickly as we did because of their work — the Moderna vaccine entered development in 2017, thanks to gain-of-function work on the MERS virus.
As the pandemic wore on, however, DEFUSE became evidence not of foresight, but of criminal complicity. It was a plan to “weaponize these mainly harmless coronaviruses into virulent pandemic pathogens,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes in The Wuhan Cover-Up.7
Kennedy spends the book accusing Daszak, Fauci, and a host of other American scientists of designing a bioweapon then intentionally releasing it — only to step back into a just asking questions routine, winking and nodding all the while.
“Will we soon see another pandemic triggered by a pathogen released from a lab — accidentally or deliberately — with a response following the same game plan as that of COVID-19?” Kennedy writes in his afterword. The most likely candidate for this next pandemic? “Monkeypox had never spread easily from human to human before,” Kennedy observes. “Sure enough — right on cue — in July of 2022, just as the COVID panic was waning from exhaustion, WHO director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus defied his own expert panel and declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern.”
The 2022 Mpox outbreak infected nearly 100,000 people worldwide, killing more than 200 and injuring scores more. It was brought under control thanks to a global public health response and mass vaccination campaign — heavily supported by the U.S. government, and by government scientists like Vincent Munster.
When Kennedy took over Health & Human Services, giving him control over NIH, NIAID, and scores of other critical institutions, many scientists were fired or resigned. Daszak and EcoHealth were barred from any future funding, cooperation between the U.S. and foreign institutions like the Wuhan Institute were abruptly halted.
Munster, however, remained. Last year, he and Kwe documented human-to-human transmission of a new strain of Mpox. The discovery, they wrote, “represents a westward spread and a substantial increase in the geographic area in Africa that is at risk for…infection.”8
When the two landed in Detroit earlier this year, they were traveling with a black case full of Mpox diagnostic gear. That included, Munster told the officers, deactivated samples of the Mpox virus — showing them the requisite paperwork for the test.
That, the Department of Justice now alleges, constituted conspiracy to import dangerous material into the United States. The government alleges that Munster and Kwe lied, and that those Mpox samples were not for diagnostic purposes at all. Both men were arrested, arraigned, and now face five years in prison.
“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo,” U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon Jr. said in a press release.
This is, of course, demonstrably untrue. The viruses, the FBI confirms, were inactive: Meaning they were incapable of infecting humans. According to the regulations cited right there in the indictment, these inactive viruses are safe for air transport (in the right packaging, which Munster and Kwe used.)
As Dr. Angela Rasmussen points out on her Substack, Munster may have at most forgotten one trivial piece of the broader set of documentation.
Rasmussen: To me, the biggest tell that these charges are pretextual bullshit is what they didn’t charge them with: violating Select Agent law or actually smuggling in a pathogen. They couldn’t charge them with that, so they instead cooked up this conspiracy and lying nonsense.
The facts don’t matter, the story does. Earlier this month that attorney, Gorgon — appointed by Trump — filed similar charges against a Chinese PhD student who shipped viral samples to the University of Michigan. Or, as the Department of Justice put it: “Alien from Wuhan, China charged with making false statements and smuggling biological material into the U.S.” That was just one of a rash of other indictments, accusing Chinese students of orchestrating a smuggling campaign of dangerous biological material, as noted by science blogger Philipp Markolin, PhD.
Gorgon alone has indicted nine individuals for transporting biological material into the U.S. These are not routine charges: As best I can tell, the Department of Justice has never filed this kind of charge prior to 2025. (I can find two similar cases, one in Boston from 2025; and one in Indiana from this year, with similar circumstances.)
All told, that’s charges against 11 people — all scientists, all foreigners, mostly students — for importing biological material into the United States, all for research purposes.
The most high-profile arrest, however, was made in April. Then, a SWAT team arrived at the suburban home of David Morens, 78 years old, as he was having his morning coffee. They hauled him away to jail.
“Dr. Morens and his co-conspirators,” Attorney General Todd Blanche declared in a press release, “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19.” FBI Director Kash Patel alleged that Morens is guilty of “illegal obfuscation” and that he “received kickbacks” for his work.
Morens is the former right-hand man to Anthony Fauci, who Patel believes should be tried for treason. (Dispatch #81)
None of the facts alleged in the indictment actually establish that Morens committed a federal crime. Instead, it paints a picture of a team struggling under a constant deluge of malicious records requests and subpoenas — from RFK Jr, then a private citizen; from Senator Rand Paul; and from a large network of activists, online influencers, and real journalists. Morens, frustrated, deleted some emails and moved some private conversations to his personal email. It was wrong, but it is not evidence of work on a malicious bioweapon.
Daszak, who is included in this indictment as a co-conspirator, knows this feeling all too well.
Daszak: To be the target of a global conspiracy theory is not good, let me tell you. It’s extremely worrying. You’re at risk, your life is at risk. We’ve had death threats from very early on in the pandemic. We’ve had a white powder letter delivered to our house. [EcoHealth Alliance] and myself have had something like 12 or 13 separate investigations into our work — any one of which, we know, the goal was to find something that they could say: “They’re to blame.” Of course, they found nothing, because we’re not.
For years, these record requests have dislodged scores of emails, documents, and memos sent between Morens, Fauci, Daszak, and others — and these armchair researchers have woven these pages into their conspiracy quilt.
Consider an email from Daszak to Morens, sent in January 20209, just as fears of the novel coronavirus were spreading.
Peter Daszak: NIAID has been funding coronavirus work in China for the past 5 years through [the project] “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” That’s now been renewed, with a specific focus that we identify cohorts of people highly exposed to bats in China, and work out if they’re getting sick from CoVs […] The results of our work to date include: […] Found SARS-related CoVs that can bind to human cells (Published in Nature), and that cause SARS-like disease in humanized mouse models.
David Morens: Great info, thanks [….] Interested in your feeling about where this is going. The experts buzzing around us are all over the map, between doomsday and not that big a deal with everything in between.
The two got on the phone to discuss further. (You better believe that Daszak underscored that COVID-19 was a very big deal.)
Kennedy, in his book, splices together bits of these “carefully crafted” emails to note that Daszak’s mention of these bat coronaviruses, capable of infecting humans, was “ominous.” He concludes: “The frightening thought that COVID-19 might be the product of the NIAID-funded Wuhan experiments was clearly nagging many of the principal [gain-of-function] players from Bethesda to Beijing.”
That simply isn’t true. It was the opposite: They were discussing how their years of dire warnings had come true. Daszak had explained exactly how SARS had emerged from those caves in Yunnan, how it had mutated and adapted as it spread from mammal-to-mammal, and how it had jumped to humans at a live animal wet market some 1,000km away. That whole process had just happened again. His experiments didn’t cause the pandemic — they predicted it.
In those emails, which Kennedy cherrypicks from, Morens invited Daszak to join as a co-author on a paper they were submitting to the New England Journal of Medicine. It was published the next month, and it remains a compelling read about the promise of virology and the peril of encroaching on nature. Along with Jeffery Taubenberger, head of NIAID’s virology section, they write:
Morens, Daszak, Taubenberger: We must realize that in our crowded world of 7.8 billion people, a combination of altered human behaviors, environmental changes, and inadequate global public health mechanisms now easily turn obscure animal viruses into existential human threats. We have created a global, human-dominated ecosystem that serves as a playground for the emergence and host-switching of animal viruses, especially genetically error-prone RNA viruses, whose high mutation rates have, for millions of years, provided opportunities to switch to new hosts in new ecosystems. It took the genome of the human species 8 million years to evolve by 1%. Many animal RNA viruses can evolve by more than 1% in a matter of days. It is not difficult to understand why we increasingly see the emergence of zoonotic viruses. […]
As the late Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg famously lamented about emerging infectious diseases, “It’s our wits versus their genes.” Right now, their genes are outwitting us by adapting to infectivity in humans and to sometimes silent spread, without — so far — revealing all their secrets. But we are catching up.10
Kennedy, of course, alleges this is all a smoke screen. It is a lie to cover up the fact that they had gone hunting for viral pathogens. They tapped Chinese researchers to run experiments on these viruses — not to develop vaccines or therapies, but to maximize their lethality. And they, intentionally or not, allowed the virus to escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then then raced to cover their tracks.
Kennedy believes that the prosecution of Morens will dislodge more documents establishing this genocidal conspiracy. Even if it doesn’t, he’ll use the disclosure materials to make that case anyway. And those documents will be used to justify the arrest of prosecution of Daszak, Fauci, and anyone else who they feel like punishing.
I think we can become numb to how truly insane this is. But it is truly insane. These are real people. The pandemic was real. The next one will be too. And yet the U.S. government is going to war with the people who have, despite all this insanity, been trying to protect us. When I spoke to Daszak last month, he offered a sobering insight into what this all does.
Daszak: Our organization has closed down. I’m out of a job. I know full well now that when scientists talk to me, it puts them at risk. So you’re isolated, you’re defunded, you’re attacked in the press, your reputation’s trashed, lies are spoken about you on a daily basis. That’s awful.
But then to make it the official policy of the US government is beyond bizarre. […] What we have here is a government that’s using it as a political tool to push an argument against experts, against the possibility of future lockdowns or mask mandates or vaccine mandates. To shut down science — not just the research that we were doing in Ecohealth, but all sorts of scientific research has been closed down that could help prevent a future pandemic. […]
These viruses aren’t going anywhere. Our research shows — pretty clearly — that the rate at which new emerging diseases is rising exponentially. They’re causing bigger outbreaks than in the past because we’re more connected. […] What this government is doing — by closing down research, by attacking scientists, by supporting an erroneous conspiracy theory, because it’s politically convenient — is putting future people’s lives at risk.
During the pandemic, we were snowed in by conspiracy theories. We observed how skeptics rejected public health advice and raged against medical science.
We assumed that this was an organic response to a traumatic experience. We thought — hoped, perhaps — that once public health measures fell away, people wouldn’t care so much about trying Fauci for treason, say. And that was certainly true for a great many people. Even if this latent distrust of science lingered, these skeptics rejoined us in society.
But for a class of person — politicians and influencers, in particular — they became addicted to the power their stories had earned them. Kennedy was no longer just the bastard child of a storied clan of politicians, he was a cultural force in his own right. He had crafted a tale so detailed, so convincing, that he was within reach of the highest office in the world.
Others, with amateurish podcasts or poorly-written Substacks, became celebrated investigators. They could pluck out a detail from within these stacks of documents, or strike a connection that nobody else had considered, and become immortalized in the pantheon of this powerful new meta-theory.
The key architects of Trump’s unlikely return to office recognized the weight this carried in the broader MAGA movement. This was a rather inconvenient position: As it meant tacitly recognizing that he, as president, was directly responsible for financing and overseeing this alleged bioweapons plot — and that the vaccines he once celebrated were, in fact, part of the mass-murder. Trump adopted it anyway. What’s more, he sharpened it into an axe with which to hack away at the administrative and scientific state.
As I wrote in the Toronto Star earlier this month: All of this will make it more likely that we face another pandemic sooner, and that it will be more deadly. (Gift link.)
To minimize that risk, other nations will need to step up and fund this work. They will need to entice researchers, particularly virologists, to come work in their research institutions. Leaders will need be vocal in defending this research from the recriminations and allegations — whilst constantly improving biosafety and biosecurity rules to minimize the risks that do exist.
Culturally, we need to actively celebrate this kind of research. It is not sexy, I grant you. And it invites unwanted memories of the pandemic that has barely just ended. But scientists like Daszak, Morens, Taubenberger, Rasmussen, Munster, Kwe — the whole lot of virologists who spend their days thinking about biological calamity — are unbelievably impressive and important people. They are the ones tasked with managing the risks caused by our encroachment on nature.
And they are the ones who understand best how we can minimize those risks. They have been advocating for a crackdown on the live animal trade and wet markets, for example; and calling for better conservation policies, which help minimize unnecessary interaction between humans and animals.
But we will never do any of those things, so long as we accuse those very experts of plotting the next pandemic.
That’s it for this dispatch.
If you haven’t already, go on and give that long-form piece in the Star a read. I’ve also been writing, recently, about the Government of Canada’s new AI strategy: Particular the why? and, ideally, the how.
Just a reminder that the content of this newsletter is now 100% free, but I’m continuing to offer subscriptions because it helps fund a lot of the research and work that goes into Bug-eyed and Shameless. (Which is substantial!)
I have been thinking about some more subscriber perks I can offer going forward, so stay tuned. At the very least, I think I’ll go back to doing semi-regular Q&As — open-ended chats where we can break down some of the dystopia-in-progress. So now is an ideal time to sign up:
I’ll be back sooner, rather than later. Stay tuned!
The Purple Death, William L. Alden. (Cassell’s Magazine, January 1895)
“Where the People May Have a Hearing,” Arizona Republic (Nov 10, 1920)
“Purple Death Rumor Proved to be False,” The Coconino Sun (Dec 3, 1920)
Bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses, Wendong Li, Zhengli Shi, Peter Daszak et al. (Science, 2005)
‘Gain-of-function’ is somewhat of a misnomer, virologists will tell you, as most of these experiments involve a loss-of-function.
Human-animal interactions and bat coronavirus spillover potential among rural residents in Southern China, Hongying Li, Zhengli Shi, Peter Daszak, et al. (Biosafety and Health, 2019)
The Wuhan Cover-Up, Robert F. Kennedy Jr (2023)
Introduction of Mpox Virus Clade Ib into the Republic of the Congo, Félix Koukouikila-Koussounda, Claude Kwe Yinda, Vincent Munster, et al. (New England Journal of Medicine, 2025)
“JW v HHS NIAID Wuhan June 2021 00692,” Judicial Watch, June 2021
Escaping Pandora’s Box — Another Novel Coronavirus, David Morens, Peter Daszak, Jeffery K. Taubenberger. (2020, New England Journal of Medicine)