COVID-19
Covid Response at Five Years: Conclusion
From the Brownstone Institute
Only a few are curious about who was pushing the controls behind the scenes, how they managed to break through all restrictions on such schemes, the trillions doled out to business interests, and how these huge attacks on all civilized precepts of social and economic functioning swept the world.
Many took months or years to recognize that false premises had underpinned the government response that overturned their way of life. Those who resisted wish they had done so earlier. Those at the forefront wish they had been more vocal and effective.
Agitated masses of people abandoned their daily routines based on the error-ridden declarations of those in authority. Americans injected themselves with experimental shots and kept their children out of school. They castigated their neighbors and instituted systems of medical apartheid in cities and campuses. They shut down the kids’ schools, covered their faces, and taught the children that people are nothing but disease vectors.
The orthodox worshipers of Government edicts banned religious gatherings, insisted the elderly die alone, and offered indulgences for their political allies. Reprehensibly, the organs of power, intertwined in a conspiracy of shared interests, promoted the panic and exploited the destruction they sowed.
Homicides, childhood suicides, and mental illness skyrocketed while lockdowns gutted the middle class. The Federal Reserve printed three hundred years’ worth of spending in two months, and fraudsters stole at least tens of billions from Covid relief programs. The federal deficit more than tripled, and studies suggest the pandemic response will cost Americans $16 trillion over the next decade.
Corporate interests looted the public treasury. Mayors criminalized Easter worship, and bureaucrats used GPS data to monitor church attendance. Millions of unvetted men from the third world poured into our country while unvaccinated Americans died after being denied organ transplants.
Supposed monetary experts flooded the economy with trillions in liquidity while keeping interest rates near zero. The military fired healthy men for refusing to take ineffective shots. Government policies transferred $4 trillion from the middle class to tech oligarchs and permanently closed businesses across the country.
The powerful heeded Rahm Emanuel’s advice and capitalized on the crisis. The Constitution was designed to restrain the powerful, but public health became the pretext to unshackle aspiring tyrants from its limitations. The Intelligence Community, through bribes, deception, and coercion, overturned the republic. Government and private industry merged forces to unleash remarkable tyranny and unprecedented wealth accumulation.
In March 2025, Dr. Scott Atlas, the White House’s chief voice of dissent protesting Coronamania in 2020, reflected: “The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure. It was the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.”
After ten weeks of lockdowns, the regime revealed its true aims. Fifteen days to flatten the curve was merely the “first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions,” as Birx admitted in her memoir.
Their aspirations were far more grandiose. As Dr. Fauci later wrote in Cell, they were prepared to “rebuild the infrastructures of human existence.” Then, a Minnesota police officer put his knee on the neck of George Floyd, a career criminal with heart disease, a Covid infection, and enough fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system to classify as an overdose.
With Floyd’s death, the pretext of “public health” disappeared, and social justice catalyzed their mission to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence.” School curricula, social media content policies, investment criteria, corporate hierarchies, Supreme Court nominations, Vice President selections, and every aspect of American life became dominated by a pernicious new ideology under the innocuous banner of inclusivity.
Meritocracy, tradition, and equality were quickly supplanted by diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those new buzzwords were merely covers for the ideology of nihilism and iconoclasm they mandated.
As the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights disappeared from daily life, so too did the physical connections to the American past. The statues came tumbling down, and shared language became taboo. While the churches remained shuttered, radicals preached a creed of anti-white, anti-Western vitriol. Freedom became reserved for those who subscribed to the new and amorphous creed. The nation added trillions to its deficit and destroyed institutions that took generations to build.
When the panic swept over the public and its representatives, the Supreme Court remained derelict, greenlighting the steamrolling of civil liberties. The Bill of Rights proved to be no more than “parchment guarantees.” As Justice Antonin Scalia explained, these enumerated rights – habeas corpus, freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of movement, the right to jury trials, equality under the law – were “not worth the paper they were printed on.”
The Framers designed a structure of government and the accompanying separation of powers to protect those liberties. Federalism intended for states to resist national tyranny; a bicameral legislature created systems meant to combat radicalism; separating the power of “the purse and the sword” – of spending and of executive power – was intended to limit despotism; judicial review would protect individual rights against the fervor of the mob; separate spheres of public and private entities would create an antagonistic balance between the rule of law and innovation.
But in the Covid response, a cabal, led by forces in the Intelligence Community and the US Military, abolished those safeguards. The federal government worked to punish insubordinate states. The legislature and the Federal Reserve opened the public coffers for the country’s most powerful forces to loot at will. The Supreme Court abandoned its role as a protector of liberty as the Chief Justice conjured a pandemic exception to jurisprudence. Unmitigated hysteria opened the opportunity for a coup d’etat as the regime marched in lockstep toward tyranny.
Five years later, fundamental questions remain unanswered, and threats are unabated. The origins of the pandemic remain clouded in confidentiality and mystery.
There has been no effort to curb the extra-constitutional excesses of the Intelligence Community. President Trump’s appointments of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Marty Makary present an opportunity for reform, but the pharmaceutical industry maintains its outsized and pernicious influence on government. Their liability shields remain intact, as do the corrupt arrangements of shared profiteering for public and private employees.
It remains to be seen whether President Trump and Elon Musk will be able to defeat, or even impair, the racket of taxpayer-funded NGOs that facilitated the destruction of 2020. The US has continued its development of quarantine camps, and pandemic frauds remain unrecovered. In March 2025, the Supreme Court denied President Trump, the head of the Executive Branch, the ability to halt foreign aid payments in a 5-4 decision, demonstrating the Chief Justice’s continued subservience to the D.C. establishment.
Many people have learned, lost faith in authority, and swear that they will not comply next time. It’s not so easy for industries that must comply or else lose their right to do business. When the health inspector tells the chicken farmer to slaughter his stock because of a PCR test, not complying will only lead to permanent closure. In other words, the lockdowns and mandates can easily come not through the front door but through the back door, basement, or attic.
It is an undeniable truth that the entire machine that unleashed mayhem is still in place. The industrial interests that pushed all these schemes still retain their access. The laws in states and the federal government have not been changed. Indeed, the quarantine camps could appear and be deployed in an instant with no real institutional blocks, and people can be rounded up and put there for reasons of politics masked as health concerns.
More optimistically, however, the resistance to lockdowns, mandates, and madness brought millions together in a coalition against tyranny. It raised awareness to the pestilent forces in our society that so many assumed were latent. The threat to fundamental rights led that amalgamation of political forces to reconsider and reaffirm the value of the first principles it had largely taken for granted. A jolt has awoken the somnambulant saunter of post-War America, creating the potential for real reform.
For now, however, that’s all there is: potential. And there is no clear indication as to the direction of that future. The President who oversaw lockdowns and Operation Warp Speed built a coalition of dissidents in his return to the White House. His second cabinet appears remarkably more resilient than the advisors of his first term. Alex Azar, Mike Pence, and Jared Kushner have departed the West Wing to make room for those who appear unphased by the uphill nature of the fight for liberty. The presence of RFK, Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Bhattacharya, and J.D. Vance represents a deliberate and monumental shift in the Executive Branch, but their capacity to make a lasting dent is still in doubt.
The perpetrators of all the outrages of the last five years, carefully documented in this series, have every hope of creating in the opposition the feel of victory without the reality. So far, the wins are pyrrhic and await instantiation in budgets, laws, and practice.
COVID-19
Major new studies link COVID shots to kidney disease, respiratory problems
From LifeSiteNews
Receiving four or more COVID shots was associated with 559% higher likelihood of cold in children, a new study found, and another one linked the shots to higher risk of renal dysfunction.
Two major new studies have been published sounding the alarm about the COVID-19 shots potentially carrying risks of not only respiratory diseases but even kidney injury.
The Washington Stand first drew attention to the studies, published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases (IJID) and International Journal of Medical Science (IJMS), respectively.
The first examined insurance claims and vaccination records for the entire population of South Korea, filtering out cases of infection prior to the start of the outbreak for a pool of more than 39 million people. It reported that the COVID shots correlated with mixed impacts on other respiratory conditions. A “temporary decline followed by a resurgence of URI [upper respiratory infections] and common cold was observed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic,” it concluded. “In the Post-pandemic period (January 2023–September 2024), the risk of URI and common cold increased with higher COVID-19 vaccine doses,” it noted.
Children in particular, who are known to face the lowest risk from COVID itself, had dramatically higher odds of adverse events the more shots they took. Receiving four or more was associated with 559% higher likelihood of cold, 91% higher likelihood of pneumonia, 83% higher likelihood of URI, and 35% higher likelihood of tuberculosis.
The second study examined records of 2.9 million American adults, half of whom received at least one COVID shot and half of whom did not.
“COVID-19 vaccination was associated with a higher risk of subsequent renal dysfunction, including AKI [acute kidney injury] and dialysis treatment,” it found, citing 15,809 cases versus 11,081. “The cumulative incidence of renal dysfunction was significantly higher in vaccinated than in unvaccinated patients […] At the one-year follow-up, the number of deaths among vaccinated individuals was 7,693, while the number of deaths among unvaccinated individuals was 7,364.” Notably, the study did not find a difference in the “type of COVID-19 vaccine administered.”
The researchers note that this is not simply a matter of correlation, but that a causal mechanism for such results has already been indicated.
“Prior studies have indicated that COVID-19 vaccines can damage several tissues,” they explain.
“The main pathophysiological mechanism of COVID-19 vaccine-related complications involve vascular disruption. COVID-19 vaccination can induce inflammation through interleukins and the nod-like receptor family pyrin domain-containing 3, an inflammatory biomarker. In another study, thrombosis episodes were observed in patients who received different COVID-19 vaccines. Additionally, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have been associated with the development of myocarditis and related complications […] The development of renal dysfunction can be affected by several biochemical factors [26]. In turn, AKI can increase systemic inflammation and impair the vasculature and red blood cell aggregation. Given that the mechanism underlying COVID-19 vaccine-related complications corresponds to the pathophysiology of kidney disease, we hypothesized that COVID-19 vaccination may cause renal dysfunction, which was supported by the results of this study.”
Launched in the final year of President Donald Trump’s first term in response to COVID-19, Operation Warp Speed (OWS) had the COVID shots ready for use in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a body of evidence steadily accumulated over the following years that they failed to prevent transmission and, more importantly, carried severe risks of their own. COVID was a sticking point for many in Trump’s base, yet he doggedly refused to disavow OWS.
Since leaving office, Trump repeatedly promoted the shots as “one of the greatest achievements of mankind.” The negative reception to such comments got him to drop the subject for a while, but in July 2022, he complained that “we did so much in terms of therapeutics and a word that I’m not allowed to mention. But I’m still proud of that word, because we did that in nine months, and it was supposed to take five years to 12 years. Nobody else could have done it. But I’m not mentioning it in front of my people.”
So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market, despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most recently, the administration has settled on leaving the current vaccines optional but not supporting work to develop successors.
In early August, Kennedy announced the government would be “winding down” almost $500 million worth of mRNA vaccine projects and rejecting future exploration of the technology in favor of more conventional vaccines. Last week, HHS revoked emergency use authorizations (EUA) for the COVID shots, which were used to justify the long-since-rescinded mandates and sidestep other procedural hurdles, and in its place issued “marketing authorization” for those who meet a minimum risk threshold for the following mRNA vaccines: Moderna (6+ months), Pfizer (5+), and Novavax (12+).
“These vaccines are available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors,” Kennedy said, making good on his pledge to “end COVID vaccine mandates, keep vaccines available to people who want them, especially the vulnerable, demand placebo-controlled trials from companies,” and “end the emergency.”
COVID-19
Spy Agencies Cozied Up To Wuhan Virologist Before Lying About Pandemic

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hub for foreign biological threats dismissed the intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan as “misinformation” in January 2021, two former government sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal meetings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.
Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
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Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.
The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”
The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of COVID than they told the public.
“Director Ratcliffe has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”
Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions from the DCNF about its suppression of COVID origins intelligence in August. Gabbard and a dedicated working group have also been quietly investigating the origins of COVID.
Protecting Their Own

Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate. Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.

Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
Gabbard disbanded NCBC in August following questions from the DCNF about its role in suppressing COVID origins intelligence.
But in the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of COVID’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission, the DCNF reported.
Scientists often received fierce pushback from former National Intelligence Council official Adrienne Keen, who helped steward former President Joe Biden’s 90-day review into COVID’s origins, an official told the DCNF. Paul’s request for records from ODNI includes a request for some of Keen’s communications.
Brinsfield and Keen did not respond to requests for comment.
Unanswered Questions
Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses and shipped the samples to Wuhan through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT, the DCNF reported in July. USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.
An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.
The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy.
In early 2020, when Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger tasked CIA analysts to dig into the matter, they came up empty, according to a New York Times report. Instead, anonymous sources smeared Pottinger as having a “conspiratorial view” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump’s current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the DNI from May 2020 to January 2021, revealed in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had pushed for the declassification of COVID origins intelligence as the DNI but that he “faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.”
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