Those who have been attending or listening to my recent talks and podcasts may have noticed that I have repeatedly stated that my opinion is that SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and somehow entered the general population approximately September 2019. Based on their report, this appears to also be the interim minority opinion of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions Minority Oversight Staff, which has been archived at the Malone Institute under the government corruption tab, and can be found here.
Here is the cautiously worded but still stunning conclusion of this interim report:
As noted by the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, the COVID19 Lancet Commission, and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence 90-Day Assessment on the COVID-19 Origins, more information is needed to arrive at a more precise, if not a definitive, understanding of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and how the COVID-19 pandemic began (see footnote). Governments, leaders, public health officials, and scientists involved in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic and working to prevent future pandemics, must commit to greater transparency, engagement, and responsibility in their efforts.
Based on the analysis of the publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident. New information, made publicly available and independently verifiable, could change this assessment. However, the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, or the presumption of accuracy. The following are critical outstanding questions that would need to be addressed to be able to more definitively conclude the origins of SARS-CoV-2:
What is the intermediate host species for SARS-CoV-2? Where did it first infect humans?
Where is SARS-CoV-2’s viral reservoir?
How did SARS-CoV-2 acquire its unique genetic features, such as its furin cleavage site?
Advocates of a zoonotic origin theory must provide clear and convincing evidence that a natural zoonotic spillover is the source of the pandemic, as was demonstrated for the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak. In other words, there needs to be verifiable evidence that a natural zoonotic spillover actually occurred, not simply that such a spillover could have occurred.
A summary of examples concerning how the corporate media have previously covered the “Lab Leak Hypothesis” explanation of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic can be found below:
By way of relevant historical context, on approximately 04 January, 2020 I received an unexpected phone call from Dr. Michael Callahan (known to me to have been a CIA agent, and separately confirmed to me by NY Times reporter Davey Alba in February 2022 as a “former” CIA agent).
During this call, Dr. Callahan revealed to me that he was calling from China, and that he was in country under cover of his Harvard Professor appointment. Further information regarding Dr. Callahan can be found in this article by Raul Diego, with research support by Whitney Webb, entitled “DARPA’s Man in Wuhan”. It is important to know that Callahan has provided advice in the White House to at least three US Presidents, including Obama and Trump.
On 04 January 2020, Dr. Callahan told me that there was a novel coronavirus circulating in the Wuhan region, it was looking like a significant biothreat, and I should get “my team” engaged in seeking ways to mitigate the risk of this new agent. My sense from this and subsequent discussions with Dr. Callahan over the next few months during 2020 was that he had been in China as part of an exchange program, sent there under his joint appointment at a Chinese sister hospital of the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, where he has maintained a faculty appointment since 2005.
Dr. Callahan asserted to me that he had been directly involved in managing hundreds of cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan during early 2020, and according to journalist Brendan Borrell, who has acted as a close ally of Dr. Callahan and published many stories (and a recent book) about his various exploits, Dr. Callahan escaped Wuhan surreptitiously by boat immediately prior to the lockdown of the region on 23 January 2020. If you believe Borrell’s story line (and I do not- Callahan is a CIA trained liar, and I have previously seen Borrell publish unverifiable falsehoods), the heroic Dr. Callahan first stepped into a Wuhan hospital the day before the lockdown:
He went to Wuhan anyway and hunkered down in a guest house, waiting to get the word from his friends. “They had to check in to make sure things were safe for me.” On Jan. 22, Callahan slipped on medical scrubs and donned an N95 mask and a pair of goggles to pass through the entrance of the Wuhan Central Hospital, a boot-shaped glass building rising up from the city’s empty streets. There, his colleagues registered him as a “guest clinical educator,” a title that would allow him into the wards as an observer. The next day, the city locked down. Callahan had just made it into the white-hot center of the outbreak.
Note the careful dissembling and cover that Borrell provides Callahan (and the CIA):
If he went to Wuhan, Callahan knew he couldn’t worry his wife by telling her about his plan. He had to be careful about telling anyone. He didn’t have official permission to travel there, after all. “It was not sanctioned, not authorized,” he said.
When Callahan set down his bag in the lobby of the Westin Hotel and was handed the key card to his room, he had to smirk. There’s 400 rooms in this hotel, and I get the same room every time? he thought. It was a fine room. Clean bathroom, firm mattress. It was also a tell. Ever since Chinese hackers stole a database containing information about his high-level security clearance, Callahan knew that someone might be watching his every move. “I’m not that good-looking of a guy, but you’d think I was Brad Pitt when I go down and get a beer,” he said. “Honeypots. But, you know, we get training for that.”
Who is the “we” that get training to avoid honeypots? Yet another tell….
Borrell now asserts that Callahan left Wuhan one week after his arrival:
All told, Callahan spent almost a week on the ground helping his colleagues keep the hospital functioning, learning about the virus’s toll on the human body, and taking note of what drugs doctors were throwing at the virus. Chinese officials were planning to tighten Wuhan’s quarantine measures, banning residents even from stepping out to buy food. Callahan slipped across the river by boat — “the black-market way” — and returned to Nanjing, where he and his colleagues had a video link with the ICU units in two hospitals in Wuhan and could provide advice and track patient outcomes. Callahan knew he needed to report what he was seeing to his friends in the U.S. government.
Which would mean that Callahan, who reported to me that he had helped manage hundreds of cases of COVID-19 while in Wuhan (600 as I recall Michael bragging, but Borrell says 277), did so early in the outbreak within a one week period. In retrospect, this is yet another lie.
Clearly this story told by Borrell is a limited hangout, as was his prior April 26, 2020 story that Callahan had examined a series of 6,000 Chinese cases during that time and discovered the activity of Famotidine as a COVID-19 treatment. I know for a fact that he never used Famotidine to treat COVID-19 while he was in Wuhan or later when he was managing the Diamond Princess outbreak and setting up the portable hospital in New York City, and only began looking into the potential efficacy after I reported to him on the findings of the group that I was leading (and my own personal experience self-treating with Famotidine when I was infected during the Boston Wuhan-1 outbreak at the end of Feb 2020).
To this point, when this false narrative was published in Science magazine, I requested from Borrell, Callahan, and Science Magazine a copy of the database which was purportedly used to make this discovery, and none of these were able to provide it. I once asked Borrell if he was also CIA, or as Callahan often says “a member of the secret handshake club”. Borrell denied any association, but there is no question in my mind that for some inexplicable reason Borrell has been publishing Callahan’s cover stories for many years. Like this one for example: “95,000 stranded at sea: What happens when a cruise ship becomes a hot zone”.
After returning from China to report to his longstanding close associate Dr. Bob Kadlac (then serving as the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response to the Trump administration), back in Washington DC, Callahan was then deployed to help managing both the Diamond Princess outbreak during the first week of February, 2020, as well as the March 08 Grand Princess outbreak. Which would mean that he would have arrived in Nanjing, China under cover of his Harvard appointment, beginning 22 Jan traveled to Wuhan and managed between 200 and 600 COVID-19 patients, emailed Bob Kadlac on Jan 28 alerting him of the emerging threat (weeks after he had called me), escaped Wuhan by boat returning to Nanjing, continued to monitor hospital COVID-19 management practices remotely from Nanjing, returned to Washington DC to report to Kadlac, and then deployed to the Diamond Princess in Japan during the first week of February.
And during this time, was supposedly was involved in a detailed statistical analysis of a 6,000 patient Chinese database (which no one else has ever seen) to discover that Famotidine is active against COVID-19. I know from personal communication with Michael that he then designed and managed deployment of the tent hospital in NY City, and then deployed to manage and set US policy for COVID-19 treatment and infection control in nursing homes. I also know that he presented the data from our research group at White House and WHO meetings as the support for advocating for Famotidine as a COVID-19 repurposed drug treatment, but did not present data from the ephemeral 6000 person Chinese data base analysis.
As for myself, I downloaded the sequence of the “Wuhan Seafood Market Virus” available on the NIH servers on January 10, and got busy with volunteers from the DTRA-funded project group at Alchem Laboratories in Alachua Florida, which contract (focused on use of biorobots and computational modeling to identify inhibitors of organophosphate chemical toxins) I had helped write and win and for which I was then serving as project manager. I directed the group to focus on identifying repurposed drugs which could inhibit the Papain-like protease of the virus (3-ClPro) as opposed to the main serine protease (M-Pro) which has been the primary focus of Pharmaceutical company research into SARS-1 inhibitors.
Computational docking studies lead to a ranked priority list which included Famotidine, and I confirmed the activity of this agent by treating myself after I was infected during the last week of February 2020. Jill got busy beginning January 04 after the Callahan call, and with my help wrote and self-published (Amazon) a book designed for a lay audience to help them prepare and protect themselves from the novel coronavirus. The highly referenced book (written by a PhD and an MD/MS with decades of experience in infectious disease outbreaks) was published during the first week of February, 2020, and was censored/deleted by Amazon in March 2020 due to “violating community standards” which were not otherwise specified at the time. No appeal.
The fact that Jill and I were able to produce and published this book in a month has been cited by some conspiracy theorists as evidence that I was “in on the game” well before January 04, but I can assure you that this is merely a testimony to the commitment and efforts of Dr. Jill-Glasspool Malone to warn and help our friends, community, social media followers, and the general population. To have this product of such hard work and commitment summarily deleted without appeal by Amazon was deeply damaging to her morale, as it would be to yours.
On a side note, early in February 2020, I directly asked Michael for his opinion on the possibility that the “2019 Novel Coronavirus” (not yet named SARS-CoV-2) originated from a laboratory. His response was that “my people have carefully analyzed the sequence, and there is no evidence that this virus was genetically engineered”. We now know that this was another lie, and that there is clear evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered.
Based on this timeline and history, as well as my own direct personal communication with Dr. Callahan, I strongly suspect that both the gross clinical mismanagement of ventilatory support during the first phase of the outbreak (responsible for up to 30,000 deaths) as well as the stunningly poor management practices of Nursing Home and Extended Care facilities throughout the USA can be directly traced to the influence of Dr. Michael Callahan, DARPAs Man in Wuhan and arguably the top US Government/CIA expert in both biowarfare and gain of function research.
Consistent with this being a limited hangout, much later during early 2022 I received a call from Dr. David Hone, Ph.D., a longtime associate (since he was a post-doctoral student at University of Maryland) and former employee of Dr. Robert Gallo’s Institute of Human Virology, in which he told me that Callahan was not present in Wuhan on January of 2020, that “we did not have anyone there at that time”, and that I should stop asserting otherwise. Dr. Hone was serving as a GS-15 rank DTRA CB civilian rank employee of the DoD at the time, essentially as the Chief Scientific Officer of DTRA CB. Clearly, this timeline is a sensitive topic, and deserves further congressional investigation. Sworn testimony from both Drs. Hone and Callahan should be obtained.
Robert W. Malone is a physician and biochemist. His work focuses on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research. You can find him at Substack and Gettr
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Every morning, hundreds of millions of people perform a socially approved ritual. They line up for coffee. They joke about not being functional without caffeine. They openly acknowledge dependence and even celebrate it. No one calls this addiction degenerate. It is framed as productivity, taste, wellness—sometimes even virtue.
Now imagine the same professional discreetly using a nicotine pouch before a meeting. The reaction is very different. This is treated as a vice, something vaguely shameful, associated with weakness, poor judgment, or public health risk.
From a scientific perspective, this distinction makes little sense.
Caffeine and nicotine are both mild psychoactive stimulants. Both are plant-derived alkaloids. Both increase alertness and concentration. Both produce dependence. Neither is a carcinogen. Neither causes the diseases historically associated with smoking. Yet one has become the world’s most acceptable addiction, while the other remains morally polluted even in its safest, non-combustible forms.
This divergence has almost nothing to do with biology. It has everything to do with history, class, marketing, and a failure of modern public health to distinguish molecules from mechanisms.
Two Stimulants, One Misunderstanding
Nicotine acts on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, mimicking a neurotransmitter the brain already uses to regulate attention and learning. At low doses, it improves focus and mood. At higher doses, it causes nausea and dizziness—self-limiting effects that discourage excess. Nicotine is not carcinogenic and does not cause lung disease.
Caffeine works differently, blocking adenosine receptors that signal fatigue. The result is wakefulness and alertness. Like nicotine, caffeine indirectly affects dopamine, which is why people rely on it daily. Like nicotine, it produces tolerance and withdrawal. Headaches, fatigue, and irritability are routine among regular users who skip their morning dose.
Pharmacologically, these substances are peers.
The major difference in health outcomes does not come from the molecules themselves but from how they have been delivered.
Combustion Was the Killer
Smoking kills because burning organic material produces thousands of toxic compounds—tar, carbon monoxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and other carcinogens. Nicotine is present in cigarette smoke, but it is not what causes cancer or emphysema. Combustion is.
When nicotine is delivered without combustion—through patches, gum, snus, pouches, or vaping—the toxic burden drops dramatically. This is one of the most robust findings in modern tobacco research.
And yet nicotine continues to be treated as if it were the source of smoking’s harm.
This confusion has shaped decades of policy.
How Nicotine Lost Its Reputation
For centuries, nicotine was not stigmatized. Indigenous cultures across the Americas used tobacco in religious, medicinal, and diplomatic rituals. In early modern Europe, physicians prescribed it. Pipes, cigars, and snuff were associated with contemplation and leisure.
The collapse came with industrialization.
The cigarette-rolling machine of the late 19th century transformed nicotine into a mass-market product optimized for rapid pulmonary delivery. Addiction intensified, exposure multiplied, and combustion damage accumulated invisibly for decades. When epidemiology finally linked smoking to lung cancer and heart disease in the mid-20th century, the backlash was inevitable.
But the blame was assigned crudely. Nicotine—the named psychoactive component—became the symbol of the harm, even though the damage came from smoke.
Once that association formed, it hardened into dogma.
How Caffeine Escaped
Caffeine followed a very different cultural path. Coffee and tea entered global life through institutions of respectability. Coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire and Europe became centers of commerce and debate. Tea was woven into domestic ritual, empire, and gentility.
Crucially, caffeine was never bound to a lethal delivery system. No one inhaled burning coffee leaves. There was no delayed epidemic waiting to be discovered.
As industrial capitalism expanded, caffeine became a productivity tool. Coffee breaks were institutionalized. Tea fueled factory schedules and office routines. By the 20th century, caffeine was no longer seen as a drug at all but as a necessity of modern life.
Its downsides—dependence, sleep disruption, anxiety—were normalized or joked about. In recent decades, branding completed the transformation. Coffee became lifestyle. The stimulant disappeared behind aesthetics and identity.
The Class Divide in Addiction
The difference between caffeine and nicotine is not just historical. It is social.
Caffeine use is public, aesthetic, and professionally coded. Carrying a coffee cup signals busyness, productivity, and belonging in the middle class. Nicotine use—even in clean, low-risk forms—is discreet. It is not aestheticized. It is associated with coping rather than ambition.
Addictions favored by elites are rebranded as habits or wellness tools. Addictions associated with stress, manual labor, or marginal populations are framed as moral failings. This is why caffeine is indulgence and nicotine is degeneracy, even when the physiological effects are similar.
Where Public Health Went Wrong
Public health messaging relies on simplification. “Smoking kills” was effective and true. But over time, simplification hardened into distortion.
“Smoking kills” became “Nicotine is addictive,” which slid into “Nicotine is harmful,” and eventually into claims that there is “No safe level.” Dose, delivery, and comparative risk disappeared from the conversation.
Institutions now struggle to reverse course. Admitting that nicotine is not the primary harm agent would require acknowledging decades of misleading communication. It would require distinguishing adult use from youth use. It would require nuance.
Bureaucracies are bad at nuance.
So nicotine remains frozen at its worst historical moment: the age of the cigarette.
Why This Matters
This is not an academic debate. Millions of smokers could dramatically reduce their health risks by switching to non-combustion nicotine products. Countries that have allowed this—most notably Sweden—have seen smoking rates and tobacco-related mortality collapse. Countries that stigmatize or ban these alternatives preserve cigarette dominance.
At the same time, caffeine consumption continues to rise, including among adolescents, with little moral panic. Energy drinks are aggressively marketed. Sleep disruption and anxiety are treated as lifestyle issues, not public health emergencies.
The asymmetry is revealing.
Coffee as the Model Addiction
Caffeine succeeded culturally because it aligned with power. It supported work, not resistance. It fit office life. It could be branded as refinement. It never challenged institutional authority.
Nicotine, especially when used by working-class populations, became associated with stress relief, nonconformity, and failure to comply. That symbolism persisted long after the smoke could be removed.
Addictions are not judged by chemistry. They are judged by who uses them and whether they fit prevailing moral narratives.
Coffee passed the test. Nicotine did not.
The Core Error
The central mistake is confusing a molecule with a method. Nicotine did not cause the smoking epidemic. Combustion did. Once that distinction is restored, much of modern tobacco policy looks incoherent. Low-risk behaviors are treated as moral threats, while higher-risk behaviors are tolerated because they are culturally embedded.
This is not science. It is politics dressed up as health.
A Final Thought
If we applied the standards used against nicotine to caffeine, coffee would be regulated like a controlled substance. If we applied the standards used for caffeine to nicotine, pouches and vaping would be treated as unremarkable adult choices.
The rational approach is obvious: evaluate substances based on dose, delivery, and actual harm. Stop moralizing chemistry. Stop pretending that all addictions are equal. Nicotine is not harmless. Neither is caffeine. But both are far safer than the stories told about them.
This essay only scratches the surface. The strange moral history of nicotine, caffeine, and acceptable addiction exposes a much larger problem: modern institutions have forgotten how to reason about risk.
Roger Bate is a Brownstone Fellow, Senior Fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics (Jan 2023-present), Board member of Africa Fighting Malaria (September 2000-present), and Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs (January 2000-present).
I recently purchased Aaron Siri’s new book Vaccines, Amen. As I flipped though the pages, I noticed a section devoted to his now-famous deposition of Dr Stanley Plotkin, the “godfather” of vaccines.
I’d seen viral clips circulating on social media, but I had never taken the time to read the full transcript — until now.
Siri’s interrogation was methodical and unflinching…a masterclass in extracting uncomfortable truths.
A Legal Showdown
In January 2018, Dr Stanley Plotkin, a towering figure in immunology and co-developer of the rubella vaccine, was deposed under oath in Pennsylvania by attorney Aaron Siri.
The case stemmed from a custody dispute in Michigan, where divorced parents disagreed over whether their daughter should be vaccinated. Plotkin had agreed to testify in support of vaccination on behalf of the father.
What followed over the next nine hours, captured in a 400-page transcript, was extraordinary.
Plotkin’s testimony revealed ethical blind spots, scientific hubris, and a troubling indifference to vaccine safety data.
He mocked religious objectors, defended experiments on mentally disabled children, and dismissed glaring weaknesses in vaccine surveillance systems.
A System Built on Conflicts
From the outset, Plotkin admitted to a web of industry entanglements.
He confirmed receiving payments from Merck, Sanofi, GSK, Pfizer, and several biotech firms. These were not occasional consultancies but long-standing financial relationships with the very manufacturers of the vaccines he promoted.
Plotkin appeared taken aback when Siri questioned his financial windfall from royalties on products like RotaTeq, and expressed surprise at the “tone” of the deposition.
Siri pressed on: “You didn’t anticipate that your financial dealings with those companies would be relevant?”
Plotkin replied: “I guess, no, I did not perceive that that was relevant to my opinion as to whether a child should receive vaccines.”
The man entrusted with shaping national vaccine policy had a direct financial stake in its expansion, yet he brushed it aside as irrelevant.
Contempt for Religious Dissent
Siri questioned Plotkin on his past statements, including one in which he described vaccine critics as “religious zealots who believe that the will of God includes death and disease.”
Siri asked whether he stood by that statement. Plotkin replied emphatically, “I absolutely do.”
Plotkin was not interested in ethical pluralism or accommodating divergent moral frameworks. For him, public health was a war, and religious objectors were the enemy.
He also admitted to using human foetal cells in vaccine production — specifically WI-38, a cell line derived from an aborted foetus at three months’ gestation.
Siri asked if Plotkin had authored papers involving dozens of abortions for tissue collection. Plotkin shrugged: “I don’t remember the exact number…but quite a few.”
Plotkin regarded this as a scientific necessity, though for many people — including Catholics and Orthodox Jews — it remains a profound moral concern.
Rather than acknowledging such sensitivities, Plotkin dismissed them outright, rejecting the idea that faith-based values should influence public health policy.
That kind of absolutism, where scientific aims override moral boundaries, has since drawn criticism from ethicists and public health leaders alike.
As NIH director Jay Bhattacharya later observed during his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, such absolutism erodes trust.
“In public health, we need to make sure the products of science are ethically acceptable to everybody,” he said. “Having alternatives that are not ethically conflicted with foetal cell lines is not just an ethical issue — it’s a public health issue.”
Safety Assumed, Not Proven
When the discussion turned to safety, Siri asked, “Are you aware of any study that compares vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children?”
Plotkin replied that he was “not aware of well-controlled studies.”
Asked why no placebo-controlled trials had been conducted on routine childhood vaccines such as hepatitis B, Plotkin said such trials would be “ethically difficult.”
That rationale, Siri noted, creates a scientific blind spot. If trials are deemed too unethical to conduct, then gold-standard safety data — the kind required for other pharmaceuticals — simply do not exist for the full childhood vaccine schedule.
Siri pointed to one example: Merck’s hepatitis B vaccine, administered to newborns. The company had only monitored participants for adverse events for five days after injection.
Plotkin didn’t dispute it. “Five days is certainly short for follow-up,” he admitted, but claimed that “most serious events” would occur within that time frame.
Siri challenged the idea that such a narrow window could capture meaningful safety data — especially when autoimmune or neurodevelopmental effects could take weeks or months to emerge.
Siri pushed on. He asked Plotkin if the DTaP and Tdap vaccines — for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis — could cause autism.
“I feel confident they do not,” Plotkin replied.
But when shown the Institute of Medicine’s 2011 report, which found the evidence “inadequate to accept or reject” a causal link between DTaP and autism, Plotkin countered, “Yes, but the point is that there were no studies showing that it does cause autism.”
In that moment, Plotkin embraced a fallacy: treating the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
“You’re making assumptions, Dr Plotkin,” Siri challenged. “It would be a bit premature to make the unequivocal, sweeping statement that vaccines do not cause autism, correct?”
Plotkin relented. “As a scientist, I would say that I do not have evidence one way or the other.”
The MMR
The deposition also exposed the fragile foundations of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
When Siri asked for evidence of randomised, placebo-controlled trials conducted before MMR’s licensing, Plotkin pushed back: “To say that it hasn’t been tested is absolute nonsense,” he said, claiming it had been studied “extensively.”
Pressed to cite a specific trial, Plotkin couldn’t name one. Instead, he gestured to his own 1,800-page textbook: “You can find them in this book, if you wish.”
Siri replied that he wanted an actual peer-reviewed study, not a reference to Plotkin’s own book. “So you’re not willing to provide them?” he asked. “You want us to just take your word for it?”
Plotkin became visibly frustrated.
Eventually, he conceded there wasn’t a single randomised, placebo-controlled trial. “I don’t remember there being a control group for the studies, I’m recalling,” he said.
The exchange foreshadowed a broader shift in public discourse, highlighting long-standing concerns that some combination vaccines were effectively grandfathered into the schedule without adequate safety testing.
In September this year, President Trump called for the MMR vaccine to be broken up into three separate injections.
The proposal echoed a view that Andrew Wakefield had voiced decades earlier — namely, that combining all three viruses into a single shot might pose greater risk than spacing them out.
Wakefield was vilified and struck from the medical register. But now, that same question — once branded as dangerous misinformation — is set to be re-examined by the CDC’s new vaccine advisory committee, chaired by Martin Kulldorff.
The Aluminium Adjuvant Blind Spot
Siri next turned to aluminium adjuvants — the immune-activating agents used in many childhood vaccines.
When asked whether studies had compared animals injected with aluminium to those given saline, Plotkin conceded that research on their safety was limited.
Siri pressed further, asking if aluminium injected into the body could travel to the brain. Plotkin replied, “I have not seen such studies, no, or not read such studies.”
When presented with a series of papers showing that aluminium can migrate to the brain, Plotkin admitted he had not studied the issue himself, acknowledging that there were experiments “suggesting that that is possible.”
Asked whether aluminium might disrupt neurological development in children, Plotkin stated, “I’m not aware that there is evidence that aluminum disrupts the developmental processes in susceptible children.”
Taken together, these exchanges revealed a striking gap in the evidence base.
Compounds such as aluminium hydroxide and aluminium phosphate have been injected into babies for decades, yet no rigorous studies have ever evaluated their neurotoxicity against an inert placebo.
This issue returned to the spotlight in September 2025, when President Trump pledged to remove aluminium from vaccines, and world-leading researcher Dr Christopher Exley renewed calls for its complete reassessment.
A Broken Safety Net
Siri then turned to the reliability of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — the primary mechanism for collecting reports of vaccine-related injuries in the United States.
Did Plotkin believe most adverse events were captured in this database?
“I think…probably most are reported,” he replied.
But Siri showed him a government-commissioned study by Harvard Pilgrim, which found that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported to VAERS.
“Yes,” Plotkin said, backtracking. “I don’t really put much faith into the VAERS system…”
Yet this is the same database officials routinely cite to claim that “vaccines are safe.”
Ironically, Plotkin himself recently co-authored a provocative editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, conceding that vaccine safety monitoring remains grossly “inadequate.”
Experimenting on the Vulnerable
Perhaps the most chilling part of the deposition concerned Plotkin’s history of human experimentation.
“Have you ever used orphans to study an experimental vaccine?” Siri asked.
“Yes,” Plotkin replied.
“Have you ever used the mentally handicapped to study an experimental vaccine?” Siri asked.
“I don’t recollect…I wouldn’t deny that I may have done so,” Plotkin replied.
Siri cited a study conducted by Plotkin in which he had administered experimental rubella vaccines to institutionalised children who were “mentally retarded.”
Plotkin stated flippantly, “Okay well, in that case…that’s what I did.”
There was no apology, no sign of ethical reflection — just matter-of-fact acceptance.
Siri wasn’t done.
He asked if Plotkin had argued that it was better to test on those “who are human in form but not in social potential” rather than on healthy children.
Plotkin admitted to writing it.
Siri established that Plotkin had also conducted vaccine research on the babies of imprisoned mothers, and on colonised African populations.
Plotkin appeared to suggest that the scientific value of such studies outweighed the ethical lapses—an attitude that many would interpret as the classic ‘ends justify the means’ rationale.
But that logic fails the most basic test of informed consent. Siri asked whether consent had been obtained in these cases.
“I don’t remember…but I assume it was,” Plotkin said.
Assume?
This was post-Nuremberg research. And the leading vaccine developer in America couldn’t say for sure whether he had properly informed the people he experimented on.
In any other field of medicine, such lapses would be disqualifying.
A Casual Dismissal of Parental Rights
Plotkin’s indifference to experimenting on disabled children didn’t stop there.
Siri asked whether someone who declined a vaccine due to concerns about missing safety data should be labelled “anti-vax.”
Plotkin replied, “If they refused to be vaccinated themselves or refused to have their children vaccinated, I would call them an anti-vaccination person, yes.”
Plotkin was less concerned about adults making that choice for themselves, but he had no tolerance for parents making those choices for their own children.
“The situation for children is quite different,” said Plotkin, “because one is making a decision for somebody else and also making a decision that has important implications for public health.”
In Plotkin’s view, the state held greater authority than parents over a child’s medical decisions — even when the science was uncertain.
The Enabling of Figures Like Plotkin
The Plotkin deposition stands as a case study in how conflicts of interest, ideology, and deference to authority have corroded the scientific foundations of public health.
Plotkin is no fringe figure. He is celebrated, honoured, and revered. Yet he promotes vaccines that have never undergone true placebo-controlled testing, shrugs off the failures of post-market surveillance, and admits to experimenting on vulnerable populations.
This is not conjecture or conspiracy — it is sworn testimony from the man who helped build the modern vaccine program.
Now, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reopens long-dismissed questions about aluminium adjuvants and the absence of long-term safety studies, Plotkin’s once-untouchable legacy is beginning to fray.
Maryanne Demasi, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is an investigative medical reporter with a PhD in rheumatology, who writes for online media and top tiered medical journals. For over a decade, she produced TV documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and has worked as a speechwriter and political advisor for the South Australian Science Minister.
