CIA notes show FDA chief-turned-Pfizer board member saw race between herd immunity, COVID vaccine

When Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya did his own study of COVID-19 infections in the university's backyard of Santa Clara County, two weeks after its first-in-the-nation lockdowns, he found nearly 50 times greater spread than official estimates, with the implication that authorities had grossly inflated the threat of the virus to the general public.

The April 2020 seroprevalence study by the future director of the National Institutes of Health put a target on his back. 

Bhattacharya accused Stanford of putting his research team through a "Star Chamber," and his NIH forerunner Francis Collins privately plotted to blacklist him and his fellow "fringe epidemiologists" six months later for writing the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated "focused protection" for high-risk patients and normal life for others.

The situation was much different when President Trump's first Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Scott Gotlieb, who left to join Pfizer's board in 2019, privately estimated a staggeringly higher rate of infections nationally just a month after Bhattacharya's study, which found a 2.8% infection rate in Stanford's home county.

CIA notes from a May 7, 2020, meeting with Gottlieb, led by then-CIA chief operating officer Andy Makridis, summarize the Pfizer board member's views: The COVID infection rate nationally was already 20-25% and the reproduction rate was 3, meaning every infected person would transmit to three new people.

Citing "nasopharyngeal swabs" from infected patients, Gottlieb said 30-60% "could be shedding virus with no apparent symptoms," suggesting "SARS-CoV-2 may not be strongly immunogenic" – producing no obvious immune response and thus primed to spread without notice.

He nonetheless "discounts" the seroprevalence studies from Santa Clara County – apparently referring to Bhattacharya's – and Los Angeles County as too "high." Gottlieb said his own 20-25% estimate and R0 of 3 is "insufficient" for herd immunity, according to the notes, apparently meaning the virus wouldn't imminently burn out.

Gottlieb shared a far lower infection estimate in his public appearances in the next few months, however, implying Pfizer worried the public would believe herd immunity was around the corner and doom its vaccine's financial viability once approved by the FDA. That April he estimated 5% – still higher than Bhattacharya's study – and in August "maybe 8%."

The drugmaker wasn't set on rushing out a vaccine at all costs, however. Gottlieb told the CIA he believed China would release the first COVID vaccine for "prestige" but it would likely be "substandard." And earlier evidence suggests Pfizer intentionally withheld purportedly positive trial results so they wouldn't help President Trump's reelection.

Pfizer didn't answer queries Wednesday about the disconnect between Gottlieb's private and public statements, which echo the repeated contradictions between then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Dr. Anthony Fauci's private notes and public statements over three years of the pandemic.

Appearing in a larger release made public Saturday by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., the bombshell appears to have been first flagged by Brownstone Institute founder and president Jeffrey Tucker on Tuesday.

The American Institute for Economic Research, where Tucker was editorial director at the time, hosted the October 2020 gathering that produced the Great Barrington Declaration, co-written by then-Harvard medical professor Martin Kulldorff and Oxford's Suneptra Gupta.

"It suggests that the CIA and Pfizer knew they were lying to the public on the very need for a Covid shot at all," Tucker wrote. "By the time of release, according to their own math, shared only privately, we would already have achieved herd immunity." 

Another user responded that then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said New York City's seroprevalence rate in April was 20%, yet Gottlieb gave the same rate for the Big Apple four months later.

"This is why I've fought so hard to bring the COVID cover-up to light," Paul wrote in sharing Tucker's post. He quoted Tucker: "both Gottlieb AND the CIA KNEW early on that endemicity would be obtained by the time of the shot release."

Tucker claimed weeks earlier that unnamed FDA and NIH officials, "who were there on the ground" during the first year of COVID, told him that mitigation measures such as school closures, stay-at-home orders and travel restrictions were intended to "delay the onset of natural immunity" so that vaccines could "get all the credit for having solved the issue." 

Asked at the time if those officials would confirm their remarks to Just the News, Tucker said he would reach out.

Gottlieb's secret seroprevalence estimate was overshadowed in Paul's release by bigger revelations: Fauci's repeated directives to recipients of his emails to delete them after reading and his steering of the intelligence community toward scientists who argued COVID emerged naturally.

It was the first direct evidence that Fauci himself knowingly violated Freedom of Information Act obligations, rather than secondhand evidence from his longtime scientific adviser David Morens, who pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to violate FOIA. Morens repeatedly told email recipients how he got messages to Fauci without creating a public record.

Fauci specifically recommended the CIA contact scientists Robert Garry, Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes. 

They co-authored the "Proximal Origin" paper in Nature Medicine that argued COVID could not have leaked from a lab, which Fauci and Collins secretly shaped but privately expressed doubt about their claims, Paul's earlier release shows.

Bloomberg published a fawning profile Tuesday of Garry, a virologist at the Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans, downplaying the internal conversations about their doubt, falsely claiming "there was no data to back up the lab-leak theory" at the time and portraying Garry as a victim of NIH retaliation through cuts to his grants.

The author, reporter Jason Gale, was included in Morens' conversations about using Gmail to communicate "because my NIH email is FOIA'd constantly." Gale expressed sorrow that Morens had to go back to "occasionally" using NIH email because his Gmail account got hacked. 

Two years later, using a new anonymous email, Morens asked then-EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and other scientists to tell Gale that House investigators demanded "hard copies of ALL my gmail" relating to them and "any Bloomberg reporter I have communicated with."

Bloomberg didn't answer queries Wednesday about the ethics of Gale actively participating in conversations where Morens discusses intentionally evading FOIA, a felony.