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The NIH is doing so much more than firing a few scientists. It’s completely remaking the agency, criminally prosecuting Fauci cronies, and wiping the 38-year Fauci legacy off the books. Special ed.
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Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Today’s post delivers a Special Edition roundup on the housecleaning that the Trump Administration has quietly acheived at the National Institutes of Health, more particularly, in Fauci’s old agency, the so-called National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases. Which apparently spends more time manufacturing new diseases than trying to cure existing ones. This is perhaps the best news yet in 2026. Prepare for excellent news.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Are you tired of winning yet? Well, get ready. Corporate media almost perfectly blacked out one of the most gratifying and encouraging stories of 2026, which quietly appeared last week in Nature— the prestigious British science journal that spent four years insisting the lab leak theory was a dangerous conspiracy. The headline included the 10 most triumphant words we’ve seen all year:“NIH ousts infectious-disease leaders as COVID scientists face US charges.”
To be honest, I can barely contain my glee about this story. But Nature dramatically framed its article as a Shakespearean tragedy. Dedicated scientists mistreated! Decades of lost expertise! Political interference in neutral and totally unbiased science! Disruption for the sake of disruption! In other words, the same old tired, recycled narratives.
But buried inside the article —right there, in plain sight, just past all the girlish emoting— was a portrait of something wonderful. You could call it accountability. I call it The Reckoning.™
Three more top NIAID scientocrats got the axe last week, bringing the running tally to eight of ten top leadership positions at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases having now been purged since President Trump took office. (Portlanders, the “Allergy and Infectious Diseases” group is where the Deep State hid its chief bioweapons engineer and ran the covid plandemic, I mean pandemic.) Seven slots currently remain open, with no one yet serving in a permanent capacity.
And here is the best detail of all: all but one of the eight pink-slipped officials reported directly to the Human Cockroach himself, Anthony ‘Mengele’ Fauci.
In other words, this is not a random housecleaning. This is a targeted, methodical, top-to-bottom removal of the specific people who ran the specific institution that was at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic response, the gain-of-function research controversy, and the lab leak cover-up. Nature’s dumb narrative is that the firings and forced retirements are political interference in science. But it is actually accountability, the accountability we’ve demanded since Day One, which is finally becoming visible— from space.
Fauci is long gone. Now the people who carried out the orders, his deputies and lieutenants, are nearly gone, too. But Nature (and only Nature) reported more. The criminal prosecutions are starting, too.
💉 Fauci might have gotten an Autopen pardon. But the list of witless, white-coated mini-bosses under him did not.
Alert readers will recall that, three weeks ago on April 28th, the DOJ criminally indicted David Morens, 78, a ‘senior adviser’ in NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 through 2022. Morens reported directly to Fauci. He was charged with conspiracy against the United States, destruction and falsification of federal records, and a truly catastrophic failure of basic operational security— all connected to a revolting scheme to conceal his communications about EcoHealth’s Wuhan research grants from FOIA requests.
As a reminder, in an email that is now the indictment’s Exhibit A, Morens —an actualmoron— explained his methodology: “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe.” Au contraire, mon amî. After EcoHealth won a new $7.5 million grant, Morens wrote to Daszak: “Ahem…. do I get a kickback???? Too much fooking money!”
If this were a heist movie, Morens would be the guy who accidentally clicks ‘email all’ with the getaway plans attached.
In other words, the culture at NIH was so corrupt that a senior federal official was bold enough to write emails soliciting bribes and confirming the agency’s in-house FOIA official taught the scientists how to destroy government records. He wrote those admissions down. In emails that he helpfully sent to everyone he was conspiring with. Thanks, doc!
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (bless him) explained, “Dr. Morens and his co-conspirators deliberately concealed information and falsified records to suppress theories regarding the origins of COVID-19. Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest — not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”
In another email cited in the indictment, Morens wrote, “We all agree that we want to keep off Of it any fingerprints of you, [North Carolina Scientist 1] and any [COMPANY #1] or grant colleagues.” He stressed, again, “I need to keep this off of govt email and govt phone text.”
Morens —a top NIH scientist, but obviously not any rocket scientist— sent this incriminating reminder about not leaving fingerprints on government email or government phone texts in a government email, from his government phone. You just can’t make this stuff up. Maybe he thought abbreviating ‘govt’ would keep it off the radar.
People— these are the midwits who broke the world during the pandemic. It sort of takes one’s breath away, doesn’t it? I blame DEI.
Anyway. Who might be the redactee in Moren’s email, the “North Carolina Scientist 1”? The Charlotte Observer, at least, thinks it might be the gain-of-functioner-in-chief himself, Ralph Baric.
🔥 Morens is no one-off. He’s dragging all the others down, one by one. Less than two weeks ago, on May 7th, HHS proposed a ban on all federal funding to Ralph Baric, the UNC virologist who conducted some of the most controversial gain-of-function coronavirus research in the country— research that, according to HHS, involved “deceptive” communications with NIAID officials.
Is Moren’s North Carolina co-conspirator Ralph Baric? Consider the recent evidence.
Last week, UNC suspended him. All his current grants are now frozen. He just announced his upcoming ‘retirement’ on June 1st, coupled with a departmental announcement packed with effusive praise for his career but conspicuously omitting any explanation for his abrupt retirement.
A Science story reported that Baric very unscientifically called the HHS allegations “bullsh*t” and claimed he intends to fight the ban. Good luck, Ralph!
Meanwhile, the now-former acting NIAID director, Jeffery Taubenberger, another Fauci crony, abruptly resigned yesterday— spectacularly rage-quitting duringyesterday’s Senate hearing. (Drama queen alert.) That brings the total to eight of ten (80%) senior NIAID positions now vacant. It’s a total wipeout. They are scouring the slate.
💉 To label it with a story archetype, what is happening now at NIAID is The Grand Unraveling, in real time. The institution built as a corrupt cult of personality around diminutive Anthony Fauci, staffed by slavish Fauci cronies, and operated according to Fauci’s secretive priorities for 38 years is now being systematically dismantled.
Not with any press conference. Not with any dramatic announcement. Quietly, methodically, one reassignment and indictment at a time. They are practically inviting the trad-media to connect the dots. But, while the media may be ruthless and cunning, its reporters are simply not smart enough to connect these dots.
Nature’s immunologist source complained that “disruption for the sake of disruption is not useful.” With respect, this is not disruption for the sake of disruption. This is an exorcism. This is ‘dirty jobs’ style housecleaning. It’s like pumping your overflowing septic tank.
Indeed, this is the natural consequence of what the Morens indictment described as a years-long conspiracy to hide the pandemic’s origins from the American people, using government resources, on government time, funded by taxpayer dollars, all while cracking jokes about breaking the law, collecting wine, and mooching promises of Parisian dinners as a ‘kickback.’
Why did they hide the pandemic’s origins? For a single, pathetically mundane reason: to protect their own butts. Now consider an even more important question: When was the last time the federal government criminally indicted a group of its own scientists?
The answer, as best as I can determine, is: never. Not like this.
💉 Think about what that means. The U.S. government has a long and remarkably consistent track record of not prosecuting its scientific class, no matter how horrible the misbehavior. The researchers who conducted secret radiation experiments on unwitting hospital patients from the 1940s through the 1970s —injecting people with plutonium, exposing prisoners to X-rays, irradiating the testicles of Oregon and Washington state inmates just to see what would happen— none of them faced any criminal charges when those programs were exposed in the 1990s.
Instead, we got an apology from President Clinton. (In between cigar sessions.) That was it. Nobody went to jail, resigned, got fired, or was even debarred.
The doctors who ran the Tuskegee syphilis study for forty years, deliberately withholding treatment from black men so they could watch them die slowly in pain and anguish— no criminal charges. (But it got another presidential apology!)
The closest example might have been Bruce Ivins, the Army biodefense researcher at Fort Detrick allegedly responsible for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people. But the DOJ was preparing to indict him when he (allegedly) self-deleted in 2008. So Ivins was never even indicted.
The Office of Research Integrity has handled hundreds of scientific misconductcases over the past three decades. The standard outcome is purely administrative: you might lose your funding, some papers might get retracted, and you might, in the worst cases, be barred from grants for a few years. That’s it.
In the previous decades, only a handful of researchers in the United States have gone to prison for research-related crimes — and those were typically over money —straightforward billing fraud— not for shredding evidence and conspiring to suppress the origins of a global pandemic.
The scientific establishment’s sense of shock and outrage at what is happening to Morens and Baric is, I think, entirely genuine. They are not pretending. They truly cannot believe this is happening. Because in the entire history of the American administrative state, it hasn’t happened— and never to senior scientists at Morens’ and Baric’s levels, not for offenses of this kind.
The so-called public-health bureaucrats and scientists are experiencing a collapse of their worldview, their identity. They never expected to be accountable for anything. They were supposed to enjoy the lucrative fruits of government largesse behind the scenes and move fluidly from one catastrophe to the next disaster.
Their expectations of immunity from consequences are no defense of the system. Rather, it’s the basis for the system’s indictment. Senior scientists should be held to higher standards than others, not collectively protected from the natural consequences of their monstrous misconduct.
So.
What the Trump DOJ is doing right now is absolutely abnormal. But the reason Naturefeels it is abnormal is not because it is unjust. It is that this kind of accountability has simply never been applied to the biomedical bureaucracy before. The rules that apply to everyone else —we who would be quickly prosecuted if we lied to federal investigators, destroyed government records, or used our official positions to suppress inconvenient science— are being applied, for the first time, to the very people who spent four years hectoring us to shut up and trust the science, while the science was busy deleting emails like the FOIA lady taught it to.
It is nothing less than the collapse of a two-tiered justice system. That is a Paradigm Shift. And Nature, bless its black little heart, is absolutely furious about it.
💉Before we depart from this wonderful story, there’s a coda, or postscript. Besides being outraged about all the sackings, debarments, and criminal indictments, Nature was just as indignant about what is replacing it.
Under Trump 2.0, the NIH’s director is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya— a Stanford physician, health economist, and the man who, in October 2020, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration with Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta. The Declaration, signed by nearly a millionscientists and medical practitioners worldwide, called for an immediate end to the broad lockdowns. It proposed “Focused Protection” instead: lock down the elderly and the medically vulnerable, but let the young and healthy live normally, and let society build natural immunity without shattering itself into a billion pieces.
That was just too much for The Science.™ Fauci and his boss, longtime NIH Director Francis Collins, secretly conspired to deploy the full weight of the federal government to subject Jay to a “quick and devastating takedown.” Then they publicly ignored him and privately got Twitter to cancel him. Now, in the most delicious irony of all, Jay is running the NIH, which oversees the NIAID. (Personal note: I worked with Jay as an expert in some of my pandemic lawsuits; he volunteered every time I asked for help. No charge. He is the real deal.)
According to the article, under Bhattacharya’s direction, the NIAID is being reoriented from Fauci’s ‘legacy’ priorities —which were pandemic preparedness, HIV/AIDS research, and biodefense— toward common infectious diseases that affect everyday Americans and basic immunology. Duh.
The words “pandemic preparedness” have been unceremoniously removed from the NIAID website. The division chiefs who oversaw HIV/AIDS research and infectious disease microbiology were both Fauci appointees. Both are gone. The Fauci stain is being wiped away. He is being erased.
After World War II, the Allies didn’t just remove the German generals. They systematically purged the doctors, judges, professors, scientists, and civil servants who had lent the Third Reich its institutional legitimacy. That process, formally titled “Allied Control Council’s Directive No. 24,” was informally called denazification. Its critics also called it disruptive. It was imperfect, but it was absolutely needed to enable the world to move on.
In 2026, the public health agencies are quietly being De-Fauci-ized.
💉 The NIH’s new vision, published in Nature Medicine in March (read it!), describes an institute focused on “the most impactful infectious diseases that Americans currently face,” rather than on preparing for the next hypothetical emergency that may or may not arrive, or on creating new deadly germs that we then pay pharma to make ‘just-in-case’ vaccines for.
Of course, Nature finds this sort of common sense downright alarming. “When you’ve spent years to put in place certain kinds of programmes and earn the trust and admiration of the scientific community,” one New York immunologist told the magazine, “disruption for the sake of disruption is not useful.”
With no due respect, I see it completely differently. The man now running the NIH was censored by the institution he now leads. To me, that’s called a professional qualification. The scientists being removed were the ones who helped organize the censorship. The priorities being dismantled are the ones that produced the pandemic response that the Great Barrington Declaration warned against— a response that closed schools, destroyed small businesses, isolated the elderly and the dying, and deferred cancer screenings and childhood vaccinations for two years, the harms from which we are still tallying. (It’s bad, even if you set vaccine injuries aside.)
Jay Bhattacharya was right in October 2020. The proud people who called him a fringe crank and organized his suppression were wrong. Now he is their boss. Hubris, meet Nemesis.
Nature calls the NIH cleanup “disruption for the sake of disruption.” I call it something else. I even trademarked it. I call it the Reckoning™. How do you like it now?
Have a fabulous Friday! Swing back here tomorrow morning for more, as we plunge back into a delicious and nutritious roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.
Rose Rambles... 