The Trump administration is moving to claw back tens of millions of dollars in pandemic relief that went to celebrities, music artists, and entertainment industry elites.
The Small Business Administration announced Tuesday that it has referred $34 million in outstanding Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) debt to the Treasury Department, marking the first time the federal government has referred unresolved debt from the program to the Treasury for collection.
The move is part of a broader effort by SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler to recover pandemic-era funds that the agency says were improperly awarded or remain outstanding. 
“Under the Biden Administration, the SVOG program became one of the biggest cash-grabs of the pandemic,” Loeffler said in a statement first obtained by The Daily Wire. “For the last year, the Trump SBA has been working to recoup funds meant for struggling small arts and entertainment businesses that ended up lining the pockets of celebrities, music artists, and elite talent agents.”
“Today’s $34 million referral to the Treasury Department is only the first one,” she added, saying the agency will continue using “every lawful tool to claw back unmerited SVOG payments.”
The Treasury referral comes after recipients failed to resolve outstanding repayment obligations through the SBA’s debt-resolution process. The $34 million figure includes principal, applicable administrative costs, and accrued interest. The Biden administration never referred the outstanding SVOG debts to the Treasury for collection, according to the SBA.
The SVOG program was created during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide emergency assistance to live venue operators, promoters, theatrical producers, performing arts organizations, museums, movie theaters, and talent representatives whose businesses were affected by pandemic-related shutdowns and revenue losses.
Congress authorized $16.25 billion for the program, with individual applicants eligible for grants of up to $10 million. 
But the program ultimately became a source of millions of dollars in federal aid for some of the entertainment industry&#8217;s wealthiest names. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lil-wayne-chris-brown-covid-relief-funds-svog-grant-2024-12">Business Insider</a> previously reported that musicians including Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, Marshmello, Steve Aoki, and members of Alice in Chains received millions of dollars through the program.
Lil Wayne&#8217;s touring company received an $8.9 million grant. Records reviewed by Business Insider showed that more than $1.3 million was spent on private-jet flights and more than $460,000 on clothing and accessories, while nearly $88,000 was charged to taxpayers for a concert the rapper did not ultimately perform.
Chris Brown&#8217;s touring company received $10 million, with approximately $5.1 million going to Brown personally. His company also charged nearly $80,000 to the grant for his birthday party.
Marshmello received $9.9 million, while Steve Aoki&#8217;s touring company received millions more. Business Insider reported that Aoki&#8217;s company used approximately $1.9 million of its grant for officer pay.
The program&#8217;s rules allowed recipients to spend grant money on a broad range of authorized business expenses, including payroll and owner compensation. That meant wealthy artists could qualify through corporate entities connected to their touring operations even if they personally possessed substantial assets, provided their businesses met the program&#8217;s eligibility requirements.
The grants were intended to help keep struggling businesses in the live entertainment industry afloat during the pandemic, when venues and performances were shut down across the country.
Instead, critics have pointed to instances in which large sums flowed to already wealthy entertainers and their business managers.
The SBA now says it is attempting to recover money it determined was improperly awarded or remains subject to repayment.
The agency began issuing rescission and demand letters to SVOG recipients in June 2025. Those recipients were given opportunities to appeal the agency&#8217;s determinations or enter repayment agreements before the SBA pursued additional collection measures.
The agency says it has recovered more than $50 million through voluntary and involuntary payments since the Trump administration began its recovery effort.
The SBA said additional referrals could follow as it continues reviewing outstanding awards and resolving recipients&#8217; repayment obligations. The SBA&#8217;s Office of Inspector General identified approximately $544 million in potentially improper SVOG payments. It also found that 2,590 awards worth approximately $4.8 billion remained open more than a year after they were supposed to have been closed out.
A separate 2025 inspector general report found that 1,080 SVOG grants remained open as of May 2025, meaning the agency had not yet fully accounted for how the funds were used. Roughly two-thirds of those recipients had either failed to submit required audits or failed to respond to questions about their use of the funds.
The program&#8217;s problems began almost immediately after Congress authorized the grants.
In 2021, amid pressure from lawmakers to get money out to struggling entertainment businesses as quickly as possible, the Biden administration directed SBA personnel to “presume applicant assertions to be true” and expedited the review of applications under $500,000. As many as two-thirds of approved applicants were reportedly on the Treasury Department&#8217;s Do Not Pay List. The SBA says its current effort is intended to restore accountability and ensure that pandemic-relief programs do not become a permanent loss for taxpayers.

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EXCLUSIVE: A-Listers Got $34 Million In COVID Relief, The Trump Admin Is Trying To Get It Back

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waste fraud abuse

Dr. David Morens, the longtime senior science adviser to Anthony Fauci, pleaded guilty this week to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States.
The 78-year-old former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases official entered the plea after an April indictment. He faces a maximum of five years in federal prison as well as a $250,000 fine, The Washington Examiner <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/investigations/4692082/former-fauci-aide-pleads-guilty-covid-19-conspiracy/">reported.</a> 
Morens first garnered backlash in 2023. The House Oversight Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic found that he had conducted official business on his personal Gmail account specifically to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests. In 2021, he told colleagues to contact him on that personal email and said he would “delete anything [he did not] want to see in the New York Times,” per the Examiner.
The same investigation showed a personal friendship between Morens and then- EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak. That private organization received government funding for bat coronavirus research carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The $3.1 million grant titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” included a $600,000 subaward to the Wuhan lab. Some researchers who reject the animal-to-human spillover explanation have referenced that work as a possible source of SARS-CoV-2. 
Prosecutors charged Morens with concealing records related to that grant, alleging he acted with at least two other unindicted co-conspirators.  According to the case, the group worked to reinstate the funding after it was terminated and to push back against the idea that COVID-19 resulted from a laboratory incident.
Although Daszak is not named in the plea agreement, the document identifies “Co-Conspirator 1” as the author of an April 2020 email that the Washington Examiner previously reported as coming from Daszak. 
In that message, EcoHealth Alliance staff confirmed they would “communicate with [Morens] via Gmail from now on.” The plea agreement says that Morens and his co-conspirators then “plotted and repeatedly expressed their intention to conceal federal records to evade FOIA and provided information to Senior NIAID Official 1 that was favorable to Co-Conspirator 1 and Company #1.”
That senior NIAID official is widely speculated to be Fauci, who at the time was the public figure of the federal COVID-19 response.
When Fauci testified before the House Oversight Committee in 2024, he distanced himself from Morens’ email practices, saying “he should not have been doing that.” Yet, the two men co-authored more than 50 scientific papers during Morens’ tenure at the agency from 2006 to 2022. Morens also briefed Fauci ahead of key White House Coronavirus Task Force meetings in his role as top scientific adviser.
Fauci himself appeared before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on July 29 and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times. 
Republicans voted to hold Fauci in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/fauci-held-in-contempt-after-refusing-to-answer-questions-about-bombshell-diary">contempt</a> of Congress after he refused to answer questions despite a pardon from former President Joe Biden that covered the relevant period. The contempt resolution has been forwarded to the Department of Justice, which will decide whether to prosecute. 
A federal judge is scheduled to sentence Morens on November 12.

Dr. Fauci Testifies In House On COVID Origins

Fauci Adviser Pleads Guilty In COVID Records Case

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A foreign-born Massachusetts mayor was arrested Friday for stealing COVID relief funds to fund his campaign and pay off personal debt. 
The FBI arrested Lawrence Democratic Mayor Brian DePena, 61, for allegedly funneling $1.5 million in COVID funds to fund his campaign, pay taxes, and pay down $880,000 on various property mortgages. DePena, who went <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/massachusetts-mayor-cant-understand-english-needs-translator-in-court">viral</a> last year for struggling to speak English, was charged with wire fraud and money laundering. 
“Mayor DePena was elected to be a leader for the City of Lawrence. He was looked up to and trusted by his constituents, but he betrayed that trust through his alleged corruption and lies,” said United States Attorney Leah B. Foley. “Today’s arrest is just another example of our determination to root out fraud by anyone, even public officials and holding elected officials accountable.”
DePena, born in the Dominican Republic, was first elected mayor of Lawrence, a city about 25 miles north of Boston, in 2021, running on a <a href="https://www.briandepenamayor.com/agenda">platform</a> of “integrity” and “citizen-centered” government. He was re-elected in 2025. 
Court documents say that DePena used Economic Injury Disaster Loans offered by the government and obtained by his business, Tenares Tire Services, as a fund for personal monetary benefit. 
From one round of $350,000 in loans deposited into his business account, DePena used $85,000 to pay off personal tax debts and moved $120,000 into a personal account, investigators say. DePena then wrote a number of checks totaling $90,000 to “The Committee to Elect Brian DePena,” according to court documents. Before the influx of cash, the account sat at just over $20. 
Another round of loans was approved by the Small Business Administration in October 2021, and $1,154,188 was placed in the Tenares Tire Services account. Those dollars were transferred into DePena’s personal bank account, which held only $1,401, the same day they were received, the Justice Department said. 
Of the new funds, another $42,000 went to his mayoral campaign, and $883,293 was used to pay off debts on properties owned in Lawrence, prosecutors alleged. 
If convicted, DePena could be sentenced to over 20 years in prison and subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. 
Despite living in the United States for decades and being elected to public office, DePena <a href="https://www.wgbh.org/news/politics/2022-03-21/lawrence-mayor-brian-depena-on-his-plans-to-turn-around-the-citys-schools">told</a> one local outlet in March 2022 that he was still learning English. 
“I practice my English because it’s very important in America,” he said. “For many years, another administration speaks perfect English and [didn’t provide] opportunity for better education, for businessmen, for kids, safety [in the] community.”
In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnxviuiMbBY">videos</a> posted by the city, DePena often speaks Spanish. The population of the city is about 83% Hispanic. 
During an unrelated court appearance last year, DePena made headlines after requesting a translator. That appearance revolved around the mayor’s efforts to shield the acting chief of police during an investigation. 
DePena does not yet have a lawyer, and The Daily Wire reached out to the mayor’s office for comment.

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Foreign-Born Massachusetts Mayor Who Can’t Speak English Arrested For COVID Fraud

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Anthony Fauci was worried that the COVID vaccine could potentially cause miscarriages. He just didn’t tell American women. Newly released text messages from Fauci’s government-issued phone show that in January 2021, as the vaccines were being rolled out across the country, Fauci privately raised concerns about pregnant women receiving them. “Since many people have significant cytokine storm and fever after the 2nd dose,” Fauci wrote to then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, “this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”  Walensky responded: “Definitely a good point.” A good point indeed.
Days later, Fauci appeared publicly and told Americans that he had no major concerns involving pregnant women. CDC Director Walensky noted without qualification in August 2021, “The vaccines are safe and effective” in pregnancy. Privately, they mused about theoretical miscarriages, while publicly they messaged unconditional confidence and safety in the vaccines.
The question is not whether Fauci&#8217;s theoretical concern ultimately proved correct. The question is why a concern serious enough to discuss privately with the CDC director and future surgeon general was not communicated with equal specificity to pregnant women being asked to make an irreversible medical decision in the absence of pregnancy trial data. Pregnant women were excluded from the original preauthorization COVID vaccine trials. The vaccines had just been introduced. There was almost no longitudinal data because, by definition, there couldn’t be. Questions specific to pregnancy and the female reproductive system remained unanswered. But a physician-scientist committed to informed consent would have been equally candid about the limits of what we knew and about the specific risks officials themselves were still considering.
Masks, schools, vaccines, children, the elderly, how far apart we should stand (six feet – not five or seven), where we should gather, and what we should put on our faces when we do – every COVID question had an answer, and the answer was usually Dr. Fauci.
And as the pandemic wore on, the spry, sometimes cantankerous government doctor who sparred with skeptical members of Congress became something else entirely: America’s high priest of science.
During a 2021 interview, Fauci argued that attacks on him amounted to attacks on science because, in his telling, “I represent science.”  Like the Bishop of Rome speaking ex cathedra, he seemed to believe that his pronouncements were beyond question.  And therefore, questions about his conclusions constituted an attack not just on him, but on the very concept of science itself – a bold if not egotistical claim.
Science cannot be embodied by any one person. The scientific method, which has brought humanity so many extraordinary advances, is actually anchored in the scientist&#8217;s fallibility. We test, we randomize, we replicate, and we invite others to prove us wrong.
Good science has always begun with humility. Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman noted, “The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” The pandemic provided no shortage of opportunities for public-health officials to fool themselves. Pronouncements about the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety in January were walked back in July as it became clear they did not prevent transmission and were associated with serious side effects. After the vaccines became widely available, women anecdotally noted irregular periods and bleeding, and some noted miscarriages and birth defects.
They often ended up in their physicians’ office asking, “Could this have something to do with the vaccine I just received?” That question should have sparked intense, apolitical scientific curiosity. Instead, women were asking it in an environment where skepticism itself had become suspect. Question the prevailing recommendation, and you could quickly find yourself branded “anti-science.”
Whether and to what degree the COVID vaccine itself, when given in the first trimester, increased miscarriage rates and birth defects was a very important question and a particularly thorny one to answer definitively, as many pregnancy-related questions are. But the concept of informed consent exists for exactly this purpose. The claim of an 82% miscarriage rate after close analysis appears to be based on a flawed assumption, but this does not absolve the vaccine manufacturers and the CDC.
Pfizer&#8217;s early postmarketing safety report on April 30, 2021 that showed an unverifiable miscarriage signal should have prompted immediate and somber investigation. An April 2021 NEJM study led by CDC researcher Tom Shimabukuro showed a relatively low/normal miscarriage rate, and it had to be revised because skeptics noted the methodology did not appropriately count pregnancies and miscarriages. The authors agreed and revised the number, increasing the rate (14.1%), but these were in keeping with “acceptable” miscarriage rates.  These were two signals, neither one reassuring. But the messaging from the public health gurus was full steam ahead when it should have been, “Discuss the risks with your doctor.”
And now there is an even more infuriating wrinkle. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SchmittForSenate/posts/during-the-missouri-v-biden-lawsuit-that-i-filed-as-missouri-ag-we-discovered-th/1604516054369336/">Sen. Eric Schmitt, who brought Missouri v. Biden while serving as Missouri’s attorney general</a>, says discovery in the case revealed that the Biden CDC was sending daily emails to Facebook demanding censorship of posts raising concerns specifically about the COVID vaccine’s impact on pregnant women.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — the Murthy in Murthy v. Missouri — was on the very text chain in which Fauci raised the theoretical miscarriage concern. You could hardly script the irony better. The same public-health establishment that privately understood there were unanswered questions was helping create a public environment in which raising those questions could get Americans labeled and even canceled as purveyors of “misinformation.” Anthony Fauci was allowed to ask that question. American women were not.
Doctors are most dangerous when they believe they cannot be wrong.  They need humility and should not tell their patients their experience cannot be real because it hasn’t yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. When the patient is pregnant, our obligation to humility becomes even greater. Pregnant women were making decisions not only about themselves but about their unborn children. They deserved every piece of information available to them. They deserved to know what had been studied. They deserved to know what had not. They deserved to know what risks officials were considering, even if those risks were only theoretical. Most importantly, they deserved the dignity of making the decision themselves, a true informed consent, which most did not receive.
Feynman, writing in 1986 after the Challenger disaster, noted: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”  Our public health apparatus did prioritize public relations and narrative control over reality. Disagreement with the vaccine narrative became something akin to heresy, and women know where that road leads. Fauci’s transformation from government physician to cultural icon allowed the media, and thus the general public, to conflate his judgment with settled science itself, rather than recognizing that he was an expert who was still as fallible as any other human.
Pregnant women raised their hands and said, “Something isn’t right here,” and we, as physicians, had a duty to help them get to the bottom of it. Many physicians failed that test because they chose to toe the company line rather than address difficult questions. Most of all, American women deserved to know that behind closed doors, the country’s most famous doctor had questions, too.
***
Dr. Benjamin Chacko is an Emergency Medicine Physician and the father of two sons.

Former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci Testifies Senate Committee On Homeland Affairs

Anthony Fauci Was Allowed To Ask Questions American Women Could Not

Anthony Fauci

Covid vaccine

DW Opinion

Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29 and declined to answer more than 100 questions. He invoked the Fifth Amendment. On Thursday, the committee voted 8-5 to hold him in contempt of Congress, setting up a referral to the Justice Department.
Millions of American schoolchildren got no hearing, no appeal, and no protection of any kind when the public health establishment he personified locked them out of their classrooms.
The people responsible are counting on you to move on. I refuse.
Fauci was the face of that establishment. The paper trail on school closures runs through two other addresses: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
In December 2024, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report after a two-year investigation. Its findings on schools should have ended careers. The Biden administration&#8217;s CDC broke precedent by giving a political labor organization privileged access to its supposedly scientific reopening guidance. The agency solicited edits from the AFT and accepted them.
Read that again. A federal health agency let Randi Weingarten&#8217;s operation help write the document that decided whether your child sat in a classroom or stared at a laptop in a bedroom.
The subcommittee found that the AFT opposed reopening and conditioned its cooperation on demands with no scientific footing, including an automatic closure &#8220;trigger&#8221; that could shutter buildings on command. Investigators concluded schools remained closed longer than necessary because of union interference. They also confirmed what millions of parents had already worked out on their own: children faced little risk of severe illness, and the evidence never justified keeping doors locked for a year or more.
The guidance was corrupted. The closures dragged on. The wreckage is measurable.
The 2024 Nation&#8217;s Report Card delivered the verdict. Reading scores for fourth- and eighth-graders are five points below where they stood in 2019. A third of eighth graders perform beneath the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Basic level, the largest share ever recorded. High school seniors posted an average reading score 10 points below the first assessment in 1992, and 45% of them landed below Basic in math weeks before walking across the graduation stage. Congress spent $189.5 billion on school relief. Achievement fell anyway.
The human cost runs past any test. During a four-week stretch of early 2021, emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts among girls ages 12 to 17 ran 50.6% above the same weeks in 2019. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek estimates pandemic-era learning loss will drain roughly $31 trillion in lifetime earnings across this century, with individual students forfeiting between 2 and 9% of their income depending on how long their state kept buildings dark.
Kids who learned to read over Zoom will still be paying in 2070. The adults who made that happen will be comfortably retired.
Not one of them has faced a consequence.
Weingarten certainly hasn&#8217;t. Last month delegates at the AFT&#8217;s 89th convention in Washington re-elected her to another two-year term atop a union of 1.875 million members. She spends her days promoting a book called “Why Fascists Fear Teachers.” The leader whose organization helped shape the guidance that emptied American classrooms now casts herself as democracy&#8217;s last defender. The audacity is remarkable. The impunity is worse.
Here is the lesson we cannot let fade. Health guidance was handed down as decree. A union with a direct stake shaped that decree behind closed doors. Parents who objected were branded enemies of science. School board meetings filled with mothers and fathers pleading for their children, and officials waved them off. The National School Boards Association wrote the White House, suggesting confrontations with parents might qualify as domestic terrorism. The group apologized weeks later. Attorney General Merrick Garland had already ordered the FBI to get involved.
That is how power gets used against children. Quietly, through email chains and edited drafts, by officials who never face a ballot.
Accountability has to mean more than one contempt vote. Congress should subpoena all communications between federal health agencies and teachers unions from 2020 through 2022 and publish them all. State legislatures should bar any agency from handing unions a seat at the table on closure policy. Governors should pull that authority from bureaucrats and give it to officials who answer to voters.
Families should keep the exits open too. Every state that expanded education savings accounts, charter access, or open enrollment after 2021 gave parents something no committee can hand down: the power to walk away from a system that failed them.
Fauci has lawyers, a presidential pardon, and the right to say nothing. The class of 2033 has none of it. Those students carry gaps in reading and arithmetic that grown men and women chose to inflict on them, and they are owed the truth about who made the call.
We are not going to forget. We will keep saying their names.
***
Ryan Walters is the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance and former State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma.

Coronavirus Pandemic Causes Climate Of Anxiety And Changing Routines In America

Fauci Took The Fifth. America’s Kids Never Got That Option.

American Federation of Teachers

Randi Weingarten

On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order that backed fewer routine vaccines for kids.
I&#8217;m actually rather indifferent to this. The reason I&#8217;m indifferent to this is that different countries have different standards for the number and the schedule for childhood vaccines.
Some of these vaccines are recommendations; they&#8217;re not mandates. But when you are talking about the vaccinations that are most likely to prevent health problems, they&#8217;re not all equivalent.
The HPV vaccine is for a sexually transmitted disease that typically leads to cancer. Thus, it seems it should be a matter of parental choice. If you are deeply worried that your kid is going to get HPV from something based on their activity, that is not quite the same as the MMR vaccine, which is for something that is infectious.
The reason the Europeans do it differently very often has to do with their nationalized health care systems: how often you are expected to visit the doctor, the prevalence of particular diseases in particular countries, etc. So that’s a little more complicated than people may think.
But I will tell you what is not particularly complicated. There is no data, none, that links vaccines to autism. This is not a scientifically-backed concept.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2483?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
But this is what the president was promoting on Monday. I object to this because data and science show this is inaccurate.
This has been a big push by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for years. The president suggested that breaking up the vaccine schedule would decrease the prevalence of autism. The data do not exist for this proposition. They don&#8217;t.
Trump stated, “It is essential to our research efforts that we have the very best vaccine recommendations in the entire world. So we&#8217;re reducing them. We&#8217;re changing it to visits over a period of a year or year and a half so they get 20% of what they would have gotten in one big shot.”
When he says “one big shot,” he says that as though it&#8217;s a water bottle filled with vaccine.
I don&#8217;t have a problem with changing the vaccine schedule, but suggesting that this is going to reduce autism diagnoses in the United States is not backed by any evidence.
The person most associated with promoting this nonsense is gone — Andrew Wakefield. He published a paper in 1998 suggesting that there was a link between vaccination and autism. In the original paper — which was later retracted by The Lancet — Wakefield and 12 co-authors <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831678/">claimed</a> to have investigated a consecutive series of 12 children referred to the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine with chronic enterocolitis and regressive developmental disorder. The authors reported that the parents of eight of the 12 children associated their loss of acquired skills, including language, with the MMR vaccine.
Number one: That was self-reported. Number two: That was an extraordinarily small sample size. Number three: Wakefield had been selecting these people, and his research had been funded by lawyers acting for the parents who were trying to sue the vaccine manufacturers.
The British General Medical Council found that Wakefield had acted unethically and had shown callous disregard for the children in his study, upon whom the invasive tests were performed. And all of this was fueled by Wakefield pushing single vaccines rather than, for example, the combined MMR. The new schedule that Trump is suggesting separates M from MR, measles from mumps and rubella, as opposed to one shot.
The reason all this was combined was to minimize inconvenience and ensure kids got the full battery of vaccines. Separating them off, the idea goes, means three separate visits. How many parents want to go to the doctor three separate times, as opposed to just doing it once and being done with it?
I&#8217;m not arguing that we can&#8217;t make changes to the vaccine schedule based on the best possible science or good decision-making, but the attempt to link this with autism diagnosis is not scientific.
RFK Jr. argued that there has been a skyrocketing increase in autism diagnoses after 1990.
The reason that exists is that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1975. It funded schools to a greater extent because of disability claims. In 1990, the federal government reset the standards for disability claims in schools, and they included autism.
So it turns out that if you are a school and you wish for additional federal or state monies, a great way to do that is through additional autism claims. It’s the same thing with ADHD, by the way.
How do I know that this is a case of incentives creating outcomes? Because there is a study done this year that compared autism prevalence by functional severity.
Anyone who has ever met kids with actual severe autism, moderate to profound autism, knows it is real.
But if you&#8217;re weird or if you have a particular skill set or if you&#8217;re kind of smart, people will say that you&#8217;re autistic now, which is stupid.
Autism is a real thing, and severe autism is disabling. Kids with severe autism very often cannot talk. They cannot interact in society. Having moderate autism means that you largely cannot fully interact. You very often need full-time care.
It is not the same thing as “You&#8217;re a weirdo with a 158 IQ.” Autism is not just “Your buddy’s a little bit weird around people.”
Guess what? It turns out that prevalence by functional severity, meaning diagnoses of moderate to profound autism, has been down since 2000. The diagnosis of moderate to profound autism was 1.5 per 1000 children in 2000. It is 1.2 per 1000 children in 2016.
Real hardcore autism is actually slightly down between 2000 and 2016. How about mild autism? The diagnosis rate for eight-year-olds has more than doubled. In 2000, it was 3.1 per 1000 children. Now it is 7.3 per 1000 children. Borderline autism has absolutely skyrocketed.
If autism diagnoses are increasing across the board, wouldn&#8217;t you expect more moderate to profound cases? Why is moderate to profound declining, while mild and borderline are wildly increasing?
So if you’re mild, borderline, or have no significant challenges, there has been a massive increase in diagnoses; if you&#8217;re moderate to profound autism, a decrease in diagnoses.
What could explain this? Could it be the possibility that, just as the number of COVID-attributed deaths skyrocketed when the federal government started paying hospitals based on COVID deaths, and so people started mislabeling heart attacks as COVID, could it be we&#8217;re getting a mass overdiagnosis?
It turns out that public policy has this impact on a wide variety of maladies. There was a pretty massive increase in disability all the way up to about 1978-79. That’s because the federal government started making Social Security disability more widely available then.
It turned out that a lot of people were engaging in fraud. And so a bunch of restrictions were imposed, resulting in a complete flatlining of disability spending between 1978 and roughly 1990.
Then there was a recession, and people started claiming disability to get the money; the government loosened it up, and boom, exponential growth.
It&#8217;s almost as though people respond to incentive structures.
Why am I pointing this out? Because data matters.
And this, to me, remains the greatest sin of people like Anthony Fauci. They destroyed any faith in data.

follow the science

The Cardinal Sin That Shattered America’s Trust

Ben Shapiro

Opinion

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Vaccines

The first batch of text messages released from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s government-issued phone is raising more questions about what Fauci privately thought about COVID-19 vaccines, and how that differed from what he expressed to the public during the pandemic.
The messages, released this week by Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY), show Fauci privately discussing concerns about the potential risks of COVID vaccination for pregnant women, including the theoretical possibility of miscarriage.
In January 2021, Fauci communicated with Vivek Murthy, who would soon become surgeon general, and then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky about the issue. In one message, Fauci said that a second dose of an mRNA COVID vaccine could “theoretically” be “associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
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<div id="attachment_1154917" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1154917" class="wp-image-1154917 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-10-at-8.55.41-PM-1024x348.png" alt="" width="1024" height="348" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-10-at-8.55.41-PM-1024x348.png 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-10-at-8.55.41-PM-300x102.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-10-at-8.55.41-PM-768x261.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-10-at-8.55.41-PM.png 1260w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Credit: Sen. Ron Johnson</div>
In another exchange, Murthy expressed his own concerns about the vaccines, telling Fauci, “I’ve been hearing the concern about the mRNA causing mutations in the developing fetus as well.” The following day, Murthy flagged an announcement from the World Health Organization advising pregnant women to avoid the Moderna COVID vaccine at the time.
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<div id="attachment_1154939" style="width: 1410px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1154939" class="wp-image-1154939 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-11-at-10.06.12-AM.png" alt="" width="1400" height="1434" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-11-at-10.06.12-AM.png 1400w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-11-at-10.06.12-AM-293x300.png 293w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-11-at-10.06.12-AM-562x576.png 562w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-11-at-10.06.12-AM-768x787.png 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px" />Credit: Sen. Ron Johnson</div>
The messages were released just days after the Department of Health and Human Services turned over Fauci’s government-issued phone to the Senate. The phone reportedly contains roughly 34,000 text messages and more than 500 voicemails. Johnson and Paul have indicated that additional material could be released after the senators complete their review. So far, fewer than a dozen of the messages have been made public.
The texts are particularly notable because of how they compare with Fauci’s public messaging about COVID vaccination and pregnancy. Just days after his private discussion about the potential miscarriage risk, Fauci publicly offered a much more reassuring assessment of the vaccines for pregnant women. In one interview about a week later, Fauci stressed multiple times that there are &#8220;no red flags&#8221; showing adverse effects for pregnant women. He later said that it&#8217;s &#8220;pretty clear&#8221; pregnant women should get vaccinated.
Fauci did not publicly discuss the possibility of miscarriage that he had raised in private, nor did he mention Murthy’s concerns about potential effects on a developing baby.
The text revelations come on the heels of Fauci&#8217;s pandemic-era diary entries, which were recently made public by Paul. In one diary entry, Fauci described suffering a pulmonary infarction months after receiving a COVID vaccine. Critics say someone publicly urging Americans to receive the vaccines, and shaping mandates, should have been transparent about his health episode.
National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya said the discrepancy between Fauci&#8217;s private and public comments helps explain the erosion of trust in public health officials. “It&#8217;s shocking to me that he was sharing private thoughts and that, when he was out in public — and he was out in the public A LOT — he didn&#8217;t share those private thoughts with the American public,” Bhattacharya told Fox News on Monday.
Folks online flooded social media with backlash, too. Peter Hasson, a former news editor, said he and his wife had to scrape by during the pandemic because his then-pregnant wife refused to be vaccinated, apparently sharing the same private concerns as Fauci and other medical professionals before we had more data.
&#8220;My wife was pregnant and in her clinical year of PA school at this time,&#8221; Hasson <a href="https://x.com/peterjhasson/status/2086937594953077140">said</a>. &#8220;But virtually none of the hospitals or doctors offices in the &#8230; area would accept PA students for clinical rotations if they weren’t vaccinated — even if they were pregnant, even if they had the antibodies — because they were following Fauci’s advice.&#8221;
&#8220;My saint of a wife put our baby daughter first and still didn’t get the shot because she didn’t want to risk anything that might mess with the baby, but we had to spend months and months living out of Airbnbs in various rural small towns across Texas — the only places in the state where hospitals couldn’t afford to turn away help from PA students, vaccinated or not — while eating the rent on our empty apartment at the same time. It was worth it but it literally cost us tens of thousands of dollars while we were a one-income household living on a journalist salary,&#8221; Hasson added. &#8220;And so now, to see Fauci had the same concerns she did? Infuriating.&#8221;
A Senate committee recently voted to hold Fauci in contempt after he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights rather than answer questions before Congress. The contempt referral is currently sitting with the Justice Department for review.
Fauci, though, received a highly controversial preemptive pardon from then-President Joe Biden on his final day in office. The pardon covers federal offenses Fauci may have committed dating back to 2014, and grants him a full and unconditional pardon for any such offenses.

SEE IT: Fauci’s Texts About Vax Miscarriage Risk Don’t Line Up With Public Statements

SEE IT: Fauci Texted About COVID Vax Miscarriage Risk. That’s Not What He Said Publicly.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Pregnancy

“I wasn’t part of the problem” during Covid-19, insisted CNN’s Dana Bash in an interview with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday. “Let me just say, for the record, that I am not saying that the entire Covid reaction was accurate. It was a scary time, and people made mistakes.” Bash later added that “What we were doing in Covid… is getting the best information, the best science that we can and putting it out there.”
But Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary shows that the media was more interested in pushing specific narratives and promoting Fauci than it was in getting the “best information” to the public. On April 17, 2021, for example, Bash herself texted Fauci, “I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I&#8230;. As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday – no one would have blamed you if you said simply ‘Mr. Jordan, go f&#8212; yourself.’”
Bash was referring to a House Oversight Committee hearing in which Representative Jim Jordan pointed out many of the “mistakes” Bash now admits were made.
The next day, Bash sent Fauci another text “pointing out that Vanity Fair recently had a headline that said: Jim Jordan trips over his own asshole trying to debate Anthony Fauci.”
Since Senator Rand Paul released Fauci’s diary, journalists have claimed that he had no real authority to impose lockdowns or mandates, suggesting it wasn’t their job to hold him accountable. “Dr. Fauci did not have the authority to force anyone to do anything,” the New York Times <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/1de9a5f6-7f9b-447d-a6cf-454f3904954f?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">stated</a>.
But his diary shows how members of the media worked to help Fauci win policy debates against President Donald Trump. As early as March 11, 2020, Fauci was aware that the press was heavily on his side, noting, “the CNN commentators (Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, David Gergon, David Gregory) all discussed me as the adult in the room and the person [we] should all trust.”
In this way, the media worked to undermine the authority of the democratically elected president by upholding Fauci, an unelected bureaucrat, as the ultimate expert and truth-teller. While today they claim that Fauci had no power, six years ago they insisted he be granted nearly unlimited power.
When Trump said Fauci disagreed with a decision in May 2020, Fauci noted that “Chris Cuomo, and Jake Tapper are trying to clarify this in my defense on their shows.” In October 2020, Kaitlan Collins contacted Fauci about a campaign ad and tweeted out a statement for him, which “went totally viral on twitter [sic] and several networks and cable reported it.”
Fauci had personal relationships with several members of the press. On April 13, 2020, he noted that CNN’s Jake Tapper called him “to make sure the interview did not cause me any problems.” On July 1, 2020, Fauci wrote that he had dinner with Tapper and his wife. “Terrific couple. Friendship building.” In October, they had dinner again at Fauci’s home.
Journalists didn’t try to hide their affection for Fauci. Chris Cuomo “gave a wonderful explanation to viewers how close and good friends we are and how I checked in on him every night including weekends for weeks during his COVID illness,” Fauci noted in May 2020. “Never saw something like that on TV.”
It’s no coincidence that much of Fauci’s diary is spent recording his various appearances and interviews. Under pressure from the media, political leaders deferred to Fauci when crafting policy, including on issues like school closures, his diary <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/145efd6c-86b7-482c-b4b8-f7635507796e?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">shows</a>.
Rather than, as Bash claimed, sharing the “best science” with viewers, TV and print journalists aired Fauci’s views without examining the evidence. If they had examined it, they would have reported on the publicly available data Fauci privately discussed in his diary. Fauci knew, for example, that vaccines <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/85c12387-d7b7-4030-9098-eb5104e7c211?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">did not prevent</a>infection and transmission and that natural immunity <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/2b5df709-c1c1-49d3-90cc-0b2576248bcc?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">was protective</a>. These facts made vaccine mandates unnecessary, yet he <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/4ac32575-f61a-43e6-a09b-a020e21d056e?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">relentlessly</a> <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a2d50c08-d88d-42bf-bfd7-7a0b31cd3cc4?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">sought</a> to implement them.
Years later, news outlets have failed to accurately report on Covid, even retrospectively. For instance, they ignored documents <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/4d90b8be-87d4-4ddb-ab36-06c0df3989fc?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">revealing</a> that the CDC received concerning reports about vaccine-induced myocarditis in 2021, and that the CDC Director lied about it. And in 2023, mainstream media outlets did not cover extensive records showing that Fauci and other scientists initially believed Covid originated from a lab in Wuhan before <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/071fc69c-b472-40f6-bb19-2e2b08a7a310?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">collaborating</a> to dismiss the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory.”
While news anchors like Bash may still believe that Covid was well-managed despite a few “mistakes,” it is by now undeniable that their preferred policies created enormous backlash not just against Fauci personally, but against medical institutions, the Democratic Party, and the media itself.
Much of this backlash is due to the kind of duplicitousness displayed in Fauci’s diary. Scientists and officials privately acknowledged the realities of gain-of-function research, vaccine-induced myocarditis, and natural immunity, all while giving the public entirely different messages and using censorship to enforce compliance.
The liberal media’s response to the Fauci hearing shows a broad lack of understanding, or lack of desire to understand. With defending Covid lockdowns and mandates still a political liability, it would be strategically wise for journalists to avoid doubling down. So why do they continue to insist that criticism of Fauci is baseless? Why can’t they reckon with what really happened during Covid?
In 2020 and 2021, The New York Times and Washington Post published article after article in support of school closures. They claimed Covid could <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/87cced0f-80ec-4740-b2f5-0309b35815e1?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“soar”</a> if schools reopened, that it was <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/46423805-72cc-495a-97eb-3f1831066983?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">risky</a> for children to play together, and that virtual learning provided black families a <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/ee52dc86-25b1-4acc-a595-f959dd34929a?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">relief</a> from racism. They published headlines like <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/c96a5af3-f7d9-4416-93f3-35fe13a398f9?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Can We Stop Telling ‘Corona Kids’ How Little They Are Learning?,”</a> <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/d349090c-ca97-4d2a-a95b-6a23e88b0142?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“The Racist Effects of School Reopening During the Pandemic—By a Teacher,”</a> <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/c272127a-2785-4a4b-bf44-b16f84308569?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss?”</a> and <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a1c9c63a-ac68-4be5-a707-431dbd7c1ef1?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Actually Wearing a Mask Can Help Your Child Learn.”</a>
This was all despite the fact that European nations had safely reopened their public schools in 2020 and education ministers in the European Union announced that they saw no negative consequences from reopening schools. As David Zweig <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/c387c76e-9078-450c-8c6c-5193f63a498a?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">points out</a>, no one in legacy media reported on this.
At first, when the Chinese government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, China, many in the liberal media questioned the approach, <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/d7592799-bbab-40e9-bea6-9347ae1257c4?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">noting</a> that it would violate human rights and be ineffective. Democratic politicians <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/555f575b-3cbe-44fc-a08e-e8600245cfb1?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">encouraged</a> people to go to Chinatown and said that concern about Covid was <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/efee174c-e87b-49ff-9e9b-c09977d01ec7?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">racist</a>.
But when it became clear that Covid offered unprecedented power for the professional expert class, the media and the broader Left changed their approach. “Many progressives see the coronavirus response,” <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/1be47999-c7b5-4554-be92-3b6d21143db6?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">noted</a> NPR in May 2020, “as a chance to prove that policies they support can work and should be made permanent… Now there is a crisis, and Democrats want to use this moment to remake the system.”
Covid could thus be used for social restructuring, locking in government spending, and continuously attacking Trump as a mass killer. Before Covid, Trump had remained politically resilient. In January 2020, the percentage of Americans satisfied with “the way things are going” went up to <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/fe4735fd-16d0-4f6e-8a2c-39ab27d4d56a?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">45 percent</a>, the highest since February 2005. And Trump had signaled that if he achieved a second term, he would take aim at many of the Left’s core achievements, including in the areas of education and immigration.
Covid offered a chance to thwart this trajectory while cementing the authority of the managerial class over democratic institutions in the name of “safety” and “saving lives.”
The Left equated wrongthink and “misinformation” with murder, justifying unprecedented censorship. When three epidemiologists from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard simply suggested an alternative approach in the Great Barrington Declaration, the New York Times called it “dangerous” for not supporting lockdowns. Journalists denounced dissenters and “the unvaccinated” in increasingly dehumanizing terms.
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/ae808a81-31bc-47b3-8e97-e7e4e1dc3086?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated,”</a> one column was titled in The New York Times. <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/fed65b3d-1936-42f2-83dc-7137eeee445c?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Unvaxxed, Unmasked and Putting Our Kids at Risk,”</a> read another. <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/2da283db-7774-45c6-aa93-eecfce685cdf?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“The Unvaccinated Are a Risk to All of Us,”</a> a Bloomberg headline stated.
The unvaccinated, explained CNN’s Don Lemon, were <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/f578a6c0-ebb5-4da9-9611-15ef58896575?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“idiotic and nonsensical.” </a>It was time to “start shaming them” or “leave them behind,” he said. Wrote a columnist in the Los Angeles Times, <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/8fe97ded-98ab-4af4-a043-f216a8f0c036?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes, but may be necessary.</a>” Others warned of “compassion fatigue” for the unvaccinated and platformed doctors who said they would refuse to treat them.
Liberal politicians who the media supported denounced their own citizens. President Joe Biden <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/5a22104a-7e52-4313-a378-24e7e5884122?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">said</a> in the fall of 2021 that his “patience [was] wearing thin” and that we needed to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.” He declared a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a8932eea-429a-4907-97e5-5b66354d89ed?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">warned</a> “the unvaccinated” that they would face a “winter of severe illness and death.”
“Do we tolerate these people?” <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/5ae06228-5b4f-4110-aade-80d5c82d7052?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">asked</a> Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, about the unvaccinated. They “are very often misogynistic and racist.” French President Emmanuel Macron <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/ba52db55-af3a-4c3c-ae01-5c74e4e71974?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">vowed</a> to put “pressure on the unvaccinated by limiting… access [to] social activities.” Someone who refuses the Covid vaccine, he said, is “not a citizen.” <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/347e4a6d-8101-4cd4-9e90-805d751c1172?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">Said</a> a commentator in The Washington Post, “Macron is right: It’s time to make life a living hell for anti-vaxxers.”
So-called “anti-vaxxers” and “anti-maskers” represented resistance to rule by experts, and their very survival was evidence that the experts, and the journalists who endorsed them, were wrong.
***
This is the first section of the author’s full essay. You can read the rest on Public <a href="https://www.public.news/p/journalists-are-still-defending-fauci">here</a> and <a href="https://www.public.news/">subscribe</a> to the newsletter.
Alex Gutentag is a Senior Editor for Public and writes about censorship, government abuse of power, and other topics. She has been a columnist for Tablet and a contributing editor for Compact. She is based in California.

Meet the Press – Season 73

COVID Bitter Clingers In The Media Will Never End Their Fauci Love Affair

Chris Cuomo

Dana Bash

House Oversight Committee

Jake Tapper

Justin Trudeau

Screenshot 2026-08-05 at 10.51.46 AM

When It Comes To Anthony Fauci, Rand Paul Is Just Getting Started

Rand Paul

And for his final act, Aaron Rodgers blasted Anthony Fauci on ESPN.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
&#8220;I&#8217;m pleading the Fifth 😂😂
You&#8217;ve gotta be kidding me&#8221; ~ <a href="https://x.com/AaronRodgers12?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AaronRodgers12</a> <a href="https://x.com/hashtag/PMSLive?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#PMSLive</a> <a href="https://t.co/kg3y0uMxxR">pic.twitter.com/kg3y0uMxxR</a>
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) <a href="https://x.com/PatMcAfeeShow/status/2084338121101983920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 3, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, ostensibly playing out his last season in the league, gave Pat McAfee a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/aaron-rodgers-rips-into-fauci-during-live-on-espn">response</a> for the ages when asked how he&#8217;s feeling about the year ahead.
“I’m gonna plead the fifth. Like that absolute coward Tony Fauci. Absolute coward. Are you kidding me? &#8230; What are you scared of Tony? I thought you were science?”
WHAT ARE YOU SCARED OF, TONY. I felt that one in my chest. Black and gold, baby. That&#8217;s my quarterback.
But the 42-year-old veteran didn&#8217;t stop there. For his own two minutes of hate, he tore into &#8220;The Science,&#8221; the network covering it, and the gaslighting that came bundled with both:
<blockquote>How much time did they spend on that? How much time did they spend on my responses every week, on my vaccination status, on Taylor and Travis&#8217;s wedding? Did they do even a minute on Tony Fauci? I bet they didn&#8217;t. &#8230; What are you gonna say about me now?</blockquote>
My heart rate spiked just typing that. The crowd was roaring. Somewhere in the back, a Yinzer was chanting &#8220;YES&#8221; like it was a third-down stop. The Terrible Towels were out in July. Their quarterback was finally getting his day in court, four years after the media was his judge, jury, and executioner, and he made the most of it.
When my kids ask why the Steelers are goated, I&#8217;m going to show them this clip. Not the Immaculate Reception, not Santonio Holmes’ Super Bowl toe-tap — this. The moment one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game looked into a camera and said, on behalf of everyone who got laughed out of the room for asking questions: I was right, and I&#8217;m not sorry.
And there was no better man to deliver it. Rodgers wasn&#8217;t vaccinated during the 2021 season; instead, he pursued alternative treatment under the supervision of a holistic doctor. He told reporters that August he&#8217;d been &#8220;immunized;” a precise, deliberate word, and the press treated it like a shibboleth. The one adjective that was supposed to sort the compliant from the heretics.
“Command room: We can now confirm his vaccination status. Still, no word on his wife’s location.”
However, when he tested positive weeks later, and the truth came out, the same outlets that had spent a season obsessing over one man&#8217;s vaccine record just about detonated.
ESPN, CNN, all the big guys, they went on a two-week rampage treating his status like a hull breach. Like the ship had hit the iceberg. Like WWEleven had broken out. Because a healthy, able-bodied adult took ivermectin instead of a vaccine.
And the fallout of the wall-to-wall coverage of the anti-vax villain? A $14,650 personal fine and a $300,000 hit to the Packers, for the crime of not forcing a mask onto their quarterback during press conferences. Prevea Health walked away from a nine-year partnership overnight. State Farm quietly slashed his airtime. He got the full scarlet-letter treatment for refusing to performative compliance for the crusade, right alongside the millions of Americans who said no and paid for it with their jobs.
Now, four years later, training camp is underway, the sun&#8217;s out over Latrobe, the Steelers haven&#8217;t laid a finger on him for saying any of it, and Anthony Fauci&#8217;s little girl diary just got read into the Congressional record. I&#8217;d wager Aaron Rodgers is having a pretty good week.
He told Yinz so.
Turns out Fauci <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rfk-jr-owns-dana-bash-proving-media-fed-covid-hysteria?author=Chloe+Trapanotto&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=RFK+Jr.+Owns+Dana+Bash+Proving+Media+Fed+COVID+Hysteria">understood</a> early that COVID behaved like a bad flu, that the virus likely came from a lab in Wuhan (when are we gonna reprimand China for this?), and that the vaccine was never going to stop transmission the way &#8220;the science&#8221; insisted it would.
The Science God probably would’ve told us the truth, but he was a tad busy posing for magazine covers, having dinner with important people, and directing his employees to enter his name for cash prizes.
And last week, instead of answering for it to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, he pleaded the Fifth 111 times. Coward, indeed.
Fauci can deny it happened all he wants, and so can CNN and ESPN, but Rodgers isn’t going to let them forget that it did, and neither are we.
But for now, in between his rants and record-setting rundowns, he’ll be on the field. Because as he told McAfee, he doesn’t care anymore about anything but playing his best ball.
He&#8217;s going out with a bang; let&#8217;s hope it ends with a ring.

Baltimore Ravens v Pittsburgh Steelers – NFL 2025

For Aaron Rodgers, Vindication Has A Pittsburgh Accent

Aaron Rodgers

ESPN

Now that we have seen the communications and diary of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and we know that his private thoughts on COVID were very different than his public statements, it’s time to ask the question: Will the real Anthony Fauci please stand up? 
On July 29, 2026, Fauci stood in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) and swore an oath to tell the truth. It was his chance to set the record straight, to tell us what he actually believes.
But that oath was not fulfilled, and that opportunity was wasted.
Not because he lied to Congress that morning but, rather, because he would not answer a single question posed to him. He refused to give the American people even one answer regarding the origins of COVID; the vaccines he forced upon them; the draconian lockdowns he championed; or the enormous human cost of his actions. He refused to answer the committee or the American people, invoking the Fifth Amendment 111 times.
Instead of cooperation, we are left with contradictions.
First, Fauci repeatedly told the public that COVID came from a wet market. But his diary shows that he knew as early as January 26, 2020, that “the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market.” This is a stunning lie. But it is only the first of many.
He told Congress that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Yet Fauci’s own diary entry of February 1, 2020, recounts that 10 of 12 experts on his call believed accidental release was the most likely source of COVID, and that it was possible “given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses.” He continued, “We could not let this go.”
In 2024, when asked by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic if he had ever deleted documents, he definitively responded, “No.” But my investigation has revealed that he made a habit of it. Fauci told colleagues numerous times to delete their exchanges with him, once telling one of his deputies to “delete this e-mail and [then] delete it from the deleted file.” His assistant once alerted him that she “deleted a ton of [his] emails this morning.” In exchanges regarding the WHO’s response to COVID origins, and in response to my own social media posts questioning his policies, Fauci once again asked colleagues to “please delete this e-mail after you read it.”
Dr. Fauci told that same House subcommittee in a transcribed interview that he “didn’t make a decision to close the schools.” He told the New York Times, “Show me a school that I shut down. Never. I never did.” But his diary betrays these statements. On May 15, 2020, he wrote that he “spoke with Bill de Blasio&#8230; and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversations tonight to close the NYC schools.” The very next day, he wrote that Governor Gavin Newsom’s Chief of Staff had relayed in a phone call “that based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”
As the 2020 holidays approached, Fauci implored Americans to keep their holiday gatherings “as small as you possibly can” and that you “may have to bite the bullet and sacrifice that social gathering.” Yet on October 23 of that same year, Fauci wrote in his diary about a dinner in his home “with Jake and Jennifer Tapper.”
Publicly, Fauci stood behind the White House podium and mourned the incredible human loss of the pandemic, while privately stroking his own ego over the attention he received. In the top line of his diary, he would keep tally of the COVID deaths each day. On April 20, 2020, when he listed the deaths of 3,000 parents, friends, and colleagues, he spent the entire entry gushing over the treatment he was receiving from the media and celebrities like Kim Kardashian.
Early in the pandemic, Fauci told the public that masks weren’t necessary to stop the spread of COVID and that they wouldn’t protect anyone, only to later insist on their importance. Fauci himself called this messaging “well meant,” a deception intended to save masks for health workers. But his manipulation of the public, from the very start of the pandemic, also revealed Fauci’s duplicity.
In yet another media profile — this one with Time Magazine in 2021 — Fauci said the COVID pandemic “confirmed what I learned with other outbreaks […] you have to be humble and modest enough to know that you’re learning as you go along.”
If only he had followed his own advice. Instead, he may be reminded of a diary entry from October 2001, in which Fauci wrote: “I believe that there will be hell to pay when the American public realizes that they have not been dealt with in a totally open manner.”  
The American people want answers on the COVID pandemic. This week, Anthony Fauci was given the opportunity to address the American public openly.
He pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times.
***
U.S. Senator Rand Paul, M.D., (R-KY) is one of the nation’s leading advocates for liberty. Senator Paul serves as the chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He has represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate since 2011. He and his wife, Kelley, live in Bowling Green and are the parents of three sons.

Former NIH Director Anthony Fauci Testifies Senate Committee On Homeland Affairs

Rand Paul: Will The Real Anthony Fauci Please Stand Up?

In a stunning revelation, Dana Bash <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/rfk-jr-torches-cnn-anchor-dana-bash-press-malpractice-covid-coverage-explosive-clash">admits</a> that it&#8217;s her job to tell the American people the truth. Where has that attitude been the last five years?
On CNN&#8217;s &#8220;State of the Union&#8221; this weekend, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the network&#8217;s chief fact-checker-in-residence got into it over how America responded to the COVID pandemic, and the two obviously had grievances to get off their chests. The conversation looked less like an interview and more like a holiday dinner after one too many eggnog martinis.
Things got heated when Bash pushed the line she&#8217;s pushed for years: Trump bears the blame, governors closed things because hospitals were overrun, Fauci didn&#8217;t shut down America.
RFK correctly called BS. 
 
Fauci&#8217;s own private diary entries show him actively engineering the closures he later denied under oath. March 9, 2020, Fauci advised New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to close schools in Westchester’s Orthodox Jewish communities. Six days later, he &#8220;convinced&#8221; Mayor Bill de Blasio to close New York City&#8217;s schools (de Blasio, per Fauci&#8217;s diary, &#8220;had already decided based on what I was saying on TV&#8221;), then went further, telling the mayor he should close the bars and restaurants too. De Blasio said he&#8217;d base it on Fauci&#8217;s recommendation.
I’m sure the “most famous scientist in the world” was giggling, penning that into the burn book.
Days later, Fauci advised de Blasio to push full shelter-in-place for the entire city over Cuomo&#8217;s objections, promising to lean on the governor himself. He privately celebrated convincing Trump to extend &#8220;15 Days to Slow the Spread&#8221; into a 30-day lockdown, calling it a &#8220;good outcome&#8221; that avoided ending mitigation &#8220;prematurely.&#8221; By October 2020, on CBS, he&#8217;d said the quiet part out loud: he recommended the president shut the country down.
Yet by 2022, once the learning-loss data and the empty ICUs became impossible to ignore, Fauci pivoted: he&#8217;d had nothing to do with school closures; the &#8220;default position&#8221; was always to keep kids in class. Wrong — the diary is the receipt. He was the top-down architect leaning on mayors and governors to do his bidding, while the press treated their compliance as spontaneous local wisdom.
Now Bash is doing damage control for the media’s image, but the damage is already done. Lockdowns shuttered 3.5 million businesses, cratered childhood education, and left the U.S. with some of the worst excess-mortality numbers among developed nations, because one man&#8217;s private certainty got laundered into public consensus, and nobody in the press box asked him to show his work.
Then Bash asked what RFK would do differently when the next pandemic hits (because, according to her experts, it’s going to happen within 10 years).
RFK quickly remarked that he’d protect constitutional rights and end the censorship that silenced dissenting doctors the first time around. Bash tried to pivot. RFK didn’t let her. “That was the job of CNN,&#8221; he told her. &#8220;To put the chyrons up on how many people are dying, to get people to comply.&#8221;
“You were part of the problem. There was absolute press malpractice. Your job is a fierce skepticism towards authority, and you weren’t doing that. You were beating up people who were dissenting.”
Boom.
And he’s absolutely correct. Take the lab-leak theory for example. Fauci privately noted the Wuhan market was an “amplifier,” not the source, and scientists on a February 2020 call he joined raised serious concerns about lab manipulation at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Publicly, the “Proximal Origin” paper (shaped with input from the Fauci circle) declared a lab origin “not plausible.” CNN ran with it. Lab leak was a “conspiracy theory,” “comic book” stuff, “widely debunked,” a “Trump talking point.” Then-CNN president Jeff Zucker reportedly ordered staff not to chase it. When former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said it was most likely a lab origin, CNN framed it as “controversial” and “without evidence.” Only years later, <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/new-york-times-msnbc-cnn-slammed-over-debunked-lab-leak-theory/">once</a> FBI and court documents leaned toward the lab theory, did the network quietly soften the ridicule.
Because ostensibly it’s their job to “tell the truth to the American people,” once the truth becomes convenient.
CNN did the same with the mortality numbers. Fauci&#8217;s own February 2020 diary put the case fatality rate at 0.2%–0.3%, closer to a bad flu once mild and asymptomatic cases were counted. Weeks later, in congressional testimony, he told lawmakers the rate was 2%–3%, settling near 1% — 10 times deadlier than seasonal flu. The scarier number is the one that stuck; CNN ran the catastrophe models and sidelined the seroprevalence data that quickly told a calmer story.
The network also frightened parents silly into vaccinating their healthy kids. Which RFK rightfully pointed out. He charged that CNN’s job was “scaring people.” From late 2021 on, CNN treated pediatric vaccination as an unalloyed moral imperative; “Kids 5 to 11 can now get vaccinated. Here’s why it’s safe.” Segments pushed shots for children under 5 the moment the FDA authorized them. Jill Biden’s CNN op-ed urged parents that the vaccine was “the best way” to protect kids. Anchors and experts framed hesitation as dangerous, citing every hospitalization while downplaying the extremely low risk of severe disease in healthy children and the emerging myocarditis signal in adolescent males.
By 2022, Florida’s health department, citing the data, said healthy five- to 17-year-olds “may not benefit.” Randomized trials showed the shots reduced short-term symptomatic infection but offered negligible absolute risk reduction against severe outcomes for low-risk kids. Transmission benefits evaporated with variants. Yet CNN kept up the pressure, treating parental caution as anti-science. RFK asked Bash to present a single study proving net benefit for children. She pivoted to “data upon data” about adult mortality and “misinformation deaths.”
A master of misdirection.
If the world does see another pandemic, it’s good to know certain scientists won’t have their First Amendment right stripped away for saying an uncomfortable truth. Take Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta. In October 2020, the trio authored the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for focused protection of the vulnerable instead of blanket lockdowns. NIH Director Francis Collins wanted a &#8220;quick and devastating&#8221; takedown. Fauci called it &#8220;nonsense and very dangerous.&#8221; On CNN, a former Harvard professor announced that herd immunity was &#8220;another word for mass murder.&#8221; The chorus followed, branding the authors reckless cranks.
Today, Bhattacharya runs the NIH. The &#8220;crazies&#8221; keep getting promoted; the experts who got it catastrophically wrong still want the benefit of the doubt.
Look, reporters get things wrong sometimes; so do experts. But there&#8217;s a difference between an honest miss and five years of &#8220;trust the experts&#8221; deployed as a gag order, while the experts secretly admitted they weren&#8217;t sure.
Fauci privately knew mortality was far lower and later walked back school closures. CNN treated lab leak as taboo and pediatric vaccines as non-negotiable. Dissenters were “beaten up.” And now that the diaries, the excess-death data, the learning-loss studies, and the intelligence assessments are public, the same network hosts are rightfully getting grilled for gaslighting us all for years.
And RFK called them on it live, to a quivering, culpable Bash. The ultimate fact-check. And it felt good to watch.

Microplastics Event at EPA

RFK Jr. Owns Dana Bash Proving Media Fed COVID Hysteria

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