The Big Freeze at HHS, CDC, and NIH

Peloni:  I remember reading about Memoli 3 1/2 years ago, and his attempt to right the ship of insanity which had come from Project  Warp Speed.  The enthusiasm was of course short lived as his speech was barely covered in any of the Pravda state run media around the world.  In fact, the outcome following his hushed outcry was to see the marshaling of all resources to push forward with even more determination to have more shots in every arm, the youth, the babies, and even the pregnant women included.  We are now watching as unforeseen heart-attacks are now routine rather than rare, and obscure and unknown cancers are occurring with sudden onset and incredibly rapid growth as never experienced before.  So, while it may seem that we should say better late than never to have someone such as Memoli leading the research arm of the American medical bureaucracies, it is highly disturbing to read about the new Stargate program which will advance as a Warp Speed 2.0, unleashing a new mRNA variant upon the world while still ignoring the harms and tragedies which were put in place following Warp Speed 1.0 .  The injuries associated from the Covid shots are real, they are severe, and they need to be addressed as if the tragedies of the past might have a bearing upon the tragedies of the future.  Indeed, where is RFK, and why is he speaking about matters, though material, are far less relevant to his efforts to prevent another disaster as followed the rollout of the Covid shots.  Indeed, it would be refreshing to hear anyone speak about the elephant in the room, the adverse effects which seem should not be spoken, even as Warp Speed 2.0 is being brought online.  Are we to only learn of the medical tragedies possible with this latest boondoggle to PHARMA after it has been unleashed on an unsuspecting public as was done back in Dec 2020?  Perhaps Memoli could use his temporary position, tied to his reputation of being an honest advocate for rational dissent to speak about what the political appointees seem to be otherwise constrained from addressing at the moment.

By  | Brownstone Institute | January 25, 2025


Part of the sweep of government in the first days of the Trump administration has been a freeze on communications. The explosion has hit the whole of public health bureaucracies, which Trump personally blames in part for the meltdown of his previous term of president in his last year. The pause in operations is designed to figure out exactly what is going on.

It is certainly not the case that Donald Trump wants you to die, contrary to Paul Krugman’s claim. No longer writing at the New York Times, he reserved his rather extreme view for his Substack account.

Recall that Krugman was 100 percent for lockdowns and all the rest including the fake science behind vaccine mandates. While most of the world was in cages, he was proclaiming the dawn of the great reset. With that reversed, he has reverted to form.

What actually seems to be dying the death is the public health bureaucracy.

As the Wall Street Journal explained in their story headlined “Swaths of U.S. Government Grind to a Halt After Trump Shock Therapy:” “While glitches aren’t uncommon during the early days of presidential transitions, some longtime federal employees said the chaos seemed more extreme this week due in part to wide-spanning differences between the agendas of the previous administration and the new one. The stalled initiatives extended far beyond Trump’s cancellation of federal DEI programs.”

I seriously doubt that public opinion registers much concern.

Let’s take a look at the actions of these agencies in the pre-inauguration days before the freeze.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced on January 17, three days before the inauguration, a jaw-dropping $590 million grant to Moderna, a driving force behind global vaccination with mRNA shots during Covid. The announcement of this grant changed the fortunes of the company’s stock price, which had been in a two-year slide.

The timing alone cries out for explanation. Was this to dump largess on the deep-state partner before Trump could stop it? Or was it tacitly approved by the incoming administration in order to keep Trump’s fingerprints from it? We’ll know based on whether this goes ahead. It will certainly be a test of the agency’s future under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., provided he is confirmed by the Senate.

For now, it has all the earmarks of an old regime grabbing whatever it can on the way out.

Over at the CDC, which exists as part of a suite of agencies under the control of HHS, we have one last communication dating also from January 17. It was to announce the “first-ever National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States.”

David Bell at Brownstone has been writing about this for longer than a year. As he describes it:

“Those pushing it envision a world in which any lifeform is considered intrinsically equal worth to others. If you must choose between your daughter and a rat, the choice should weigh the probability of survival of each, or may do the least harm to other lifeforms after being saved. Within this ‘equitable’ worldview, humans become a pollutant. Ever-growing human populations have driven other species to extinction through environmental change, from the megafauna of ancient Australasia to the plummeting insect populations of modern Europe. Humans become a plague upon the earth, and their restriction, impoverishment, and death may therefore be justified for a greater good.”

The connection here to Fauci et al, and their view concerning spillover diseases from animals to humans – a major reason why they were so insistent on the zoonotic origins of Covid – is rather obvious.

In the middle of the worst part of US lockdowns, Fauci and his co-author David Morens wrote an article for Cell in which they explain that the real problem with life on earth began 12,000 years ago when “human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops. These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature.”

It’s always with the same theme. If there were fewer of us, had we never had much contact with each other, if we never dared to cultivate crops, domestic animals, store water, and move around, we could have been spared all diseases.

The real problem is what we call civilization itself, which is why the article ends with an assault on “overcrowding in dwellings and places of human congregation (sports venues, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement,” all of which “catalyzes disease spread.”

The only solution, in this view, is “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”

One Health, as newly embraced by the CDC, amounts to a radical transformation of the basis of social order itself, under the guidance of god-like scientists who alone know how to structure the best life for all living things, even if that comes at the expense of human flourishing.

David Bell describes this creepy strain of belief as a “cult” but it might also be described as an ideology very different from the dominant ones in the 20th century. Socialism might have proven unworkable but at least it aspired to the improvement of human life. Capitalist ideology was the same. This is something different, with more in common with the far-flung imaginings of Rousseau or the Prophet Mani who shared in common the belief that all attempts to create what we call civilization are inherently corrupting of our perfect state of nature.

This was part of the underlying philosophical infrastructure of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, not merely a public health establishment doing crazy things that happened to be captured by high-powered industrial interests. There was a dreamy and ultimately ghastly utopianism backing all of these actions, stemming from hot-house salons of government-funded science cabals where they not only refuse to speak to normal people; they have nothing but disdain for the aspirations of the common folk and their attachments to property, family, and tradition (which includes, for example, home remedies on dealing with infectious disease).

How it came to be that our main engines of public health came to be captured in whole by such a crazed ideology would require a deep and expansive investigation. Certainly, it happened gradually and largely out of the public eye, so much so that even our best investigative writers are still trying to wrap their brains around it all. Whatever this ideology is, it captured nearly the entire planet Earth in the years 2020-2023 or thereabouts and resulted in a health crisis without precedent in modern times.

Part of the result of that grand experiment was the unseating of a variety of populist leaders in the US, UK, and Brazil. This seems to have set in motion what Walter Kirn has called “a coup against a coup,” as the astonishing avalanche of executive orders reveals. The flurry of news – including a full reaffirmation of free speech, a purge of all DEI edicts, a deletion of previous dictates on Central Bank Digital Currencies, and a full hiring freeze in the federal government – has been so massive that the pundit class has been left gasping to stay on top of it all.

As for NIH, Jay Bhattacharya has been tagged to head the agency. As he awaits Senate confirmation, the acting head is Dr. Matthew Memoli, an award-winning vaccinologist who has worked at NIH for 16 years. In defiance of the regime, he argued in 2021 that “with existing vaccines, blanket vaccination of people at low risk of severe illness could hamper the development of more-robust immunity gained across a population from infection.”

Our own Fellow Bret Swanson took note of this one dissident within the Fauci ranks and celebrated his resolve to speak truth to power, in a complete takedown of evil four years ago. The doctor came under fire for daring to disagree.

Now Dr. Memoli heads the agency he defied. He remains in that position until the man once called a “fringe epidemiologist” by the previous head of NIH takes full control. This is as close to revolution and counterrevolution as you will find in a democratic society.

Something big and potentially wonderful is happening in the realm of public health, which was deployed for egregious purposes only a few years ago. It is a turning point of some sort, and one can hope that the results are consistent with the health, well-being, and freedom of everyone.

For now, there doesn’t seem to be too much in the way of public panic about the big freeze at HHS-related agencies, much less the removal of Anthony Fauci’s expensive security detail.


Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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January 26, 2025 | 1 Comment »

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  1. The COVID debacle proved to be an inflection point in my medical learning. Because I was retired and not having to actually work in hospital settings, I was free time wise to read journal articles and learn a lot more about the science of microbiology.

    I learned that medical school curricula had been hijacked by influential and wealthy patrons such as the Rockefeller Foundation, whose goal was to “professionalize” doctors starting in the 1930’s by figuring out how to use the petroleum products which they had in great quantities. They began to look for diseases that could be ‘cured’ by these new drugs. Medical school curricula began to reflect what the patrons wanted: doctors were indoctrinated from medical school onward in the germ theory, as if it wasn’t a theory at all but a fact. We were taught that micro-organisms caused many diseases and infections, and that viruses caused many infections as well. We were never encouraged to be skeptical and question “the science,” but we were given the idea that everything we were learning had been verified by the scientific method, which I later learned was completely untrue.

    Once I started to read the virology papers which “proved” the existence of viruses I could see by their methodology that they had proved no such thing. All they proved is that what they were putting into the cell culture actually caused the cells to die, not because a “virus” was in there. These virologists never included a control which is absolutely necessary to prove anything.

    So if there are no viruses then why do we need vaccines? We don’t.

    Vaccines are the cause of an increasing amount of childhood neurologic abnormalities including but not limited to autism, seizure disorders, etc. due to the presence of aluminum and other toxic elements in the vaccines.

    In the 1980’s children had 8 vaccines required now children have 69 vaccines required. The vaccine manufacturers are completely protected from liability no matter what harms they cause. And there is a great deal of illness caused by childhood vaccines being required.

    The mRNA platform is gene therapy. They called it a vaccine so they would have no liability for any harms. It is not a vaccine, it’s straight gene therapy and it can get into the nucleus of cells and change the cell’s DNA.

    As Peloni pointed out the harms from this platform have been unacceptable: millions of people around the world have had serious adverse effects such as thromboembolism, stroke, myocarditis, heart attack, and sterility just to name a few.

    This product MUST BE TAKEN OFF THE MARKET and never MARKETED AGAIN!

    It was a Crime Against Humanity to insist people take an injection that was never adequately safety tested for the people who were forced to take it, or for the people who thought if they took it they’d be able to get out of lockdown. This was extreme manipulation of the population, and it was for the purpose of global depopulation. That is the reason for the mRNA platform, and for the military nature of the program called Op Warp Speed.

    Trump really needs to sit down with someone who truly understands the dangers of living in fear of being attacked by microorganisms all the time. We have bacteria and fungi that live on us and in us. They help us, they don’t harm us. This is nature’s program for healing. If we have any dead or dying tissue the bacteria or fungi break it down and clear it from the body. The bacteria in the gut help us digest our food. They don’t attack us.

    Of course it is easy to find indoctrinated doctors who believe in the fairy tale of viruses and of our bodies being constantly in danger of being attacked by bacteria.

    What Trump needs is a doctor who has recognized the dogma of our medical training and has liberated him or herself from it. Trump just doesn’t have the scientific background to wade through the weeds of reading the scientific literature himself, figuring out which papers utilize the scientific method and have findings based upon evidence and which do not.

    At this point it is unclear what Trump has in store for the health of Americans. I think he is open to a range of ideas and I think he is trying to encourage COMPETITION between various members of his administration. Competition fosters new ideas and the best ideas win. In addition it is a way to establish meritocracy when the best idea wins. This is the American spirit, but other countries have a similar spirit.

    From what I know of Israel, I would say Israel has this spirit even more: because it is a small country everyone must contribute! It’s not left to several genius CEO’s to come up with ideas, but everyone in the country is encouraged to do what they can to make Israel great.