Trump’s Acting NIH Director Cast Doubt On COVID Vaccines At Event Full Of Corporate Allies
Dr. Matthew Memoli made the comments during a panel discussion with Trump’s current NIH pick and his former COVID adviser.
Written by Walker Bragman Published: 1/28/25
This piece has been updated from its original email version.
Donald Trump’s acting director of the National Institutes of Health cast doubt on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during a panel discussion this summer with the president’s pick to ultimately lead the agency.
On January 22, the Trump administration named Dr. Matthew Memoli as acting director of the NIH. A veteran of the agency and researcher whose focus has been on influenza and other infectious diseases, Memoli was a vocal opponent of COVID vaccine mandates and a proponent of “natural immunity” to the disease, meaning immunity arising from infection. In 2021, Memoli famously clashed with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, telling him over email that mandates were “extraordinarily problematic” and explaining, “I think the way we are using the vaccines is wrong.”
Memoli himself applied for vaccine exemptions and argued that blanket vaccination policies would be harmful, possibly preventing more robust immunity from infection at the population level. Instead, he suggested vaccination be for the vulnerable only. The COVID vaccines have saved millions of American lives and prevented more than $1 trillion in economic damages according to research from the Commonwealth Fund.
At the symposium, which was stacked with corporate allies, Memoli reiterated his skepticism of the mRNA COVID jabs criticizing the U.S. vaccination campaign, mitigation measures more broadly, and the NIH itself.
The focus of the symposium, which occurred last June, was “ideological capture of universities and institutions.” The event was hosted by the New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota that Gov. Ron DeSantis has sought to transforminto a conservative stronghold. Opening remarks were given by Richard Corcoran, the school’s president who was chosen by a board of trustees stacked with DeSantis appointees. The governor had previously appointed Cocoran commissioner of education in 2018. Before that, he was the GOP speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.
The event sponsor was the Global Liberty Institute, a dark money outfit headed up by two senior fellows at the right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford University: former Trump adviser and radiologist Dr. Scott Atlas, who was cited in a House report for playing an instrumental role in getting the White House to scale down COVID testing early on in the pandemic, and economist Joshua Rauh. Atlas spoke at the event on a panel with Memoli.
A number of the other panelists were affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a business-aligned right-wing think tank founded in 1938 by a number of executives from companies like Chrysler, Eli Lilly, and General Mills. AEI has become a force in American politics fighting for corporate interests with financial backing from ultra-wealthy individuals and families. For example, Stand Together Trust, a dark money funding outfit affiliated with petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch, gave the group $750,000 in 2023.
AEI’s board of directors, meanwhile, is made up of leading business and financial executives—overwhelmingly white men. They include the CEO of Dell, the CEO of State Farm, a top investment asset management executive, a packaging company CEO, a real estate developer, a private equity CEO, and others. Peter H. Coors, of the Coors brewing family, is the board chairman.
The panel Memoli spoke on, which was led by Atlas, was focused on “science & public health.” They were joined by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist from Stanford and the Hoover Institution. Bhattacharya, who advised the president during his first term, is Trump’s pick to ultimately lead the NIH and has been one of the most prolific advocates of a right-wing COVID herd immunity strategy based on mass infection of the population for the sake of economic normalcy.
Atlas and Bhattacharya have cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines. The former called the shots “experimental” and suggested they ought not have been given to children. The latter, meanwhile, has been an ally of Robert Kennedy Jr. and other anti-vaxxers. As The Globe and Mail reported, he was recently part of a task force organized by the right-wing premier of Alberta, Canada, Danielle Smith, which, among other things, advised the government restricting the use of mRNA vaccines. The report, which the president of the Alberta Medical Association called “anti-science” and “anti-evidence” also defended the use of ivermectin as a COVID treatment despite a body of research indicating it is not effective against the disease, and cast doubt on the efficacy of proven measures like masking.
Both men were also involved in the planning and execution of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document written and signed at a conference hosted by a Koch-supported libertarian think tank, American Institute for Economic Research, which articulated the herd immunity plan. Atlas provided organizational help from within the Trump administration, securing travel arrangements for one of the co-authors, while Bhattacharya co-authored the document.
On the panel, Memoli praised his contrarian counterparts, telling the audience he felt “honored sharing the stage with these two gentlemen” and adding “It really is an honor to be up here with them.”
“I know you’re probably looking at them and saying, who is this? What am I doing up here with them?” he said.
Memoli expressed his misgivings about the proven mRNA COVID vaccines, describing an interaction he’d had with a Moderna scientist to cast support for the widespread use of the shots—and pandemic control efforts generally—as a mistake.
“I explained to this person some of the concerns I had regarding safety, and we were talking about how, you really don’t have control of the mRNA—it can go anywhere in the body, it could go to the heart and cause inflammation,” Memoli said. “And this person, who I think is a very good scientist and a very smart person, acted like they had never even thought about this, or that this was completely new information that they had never heard before.”
“I was sort of shocked, but then I started thinking about it,” he continued. “This person has a very particular specialty in science and just doesn’t think about anything else other than that particular thing. So they’re not thinking about, you know, the whole person or what the consequences are.”
Memoli called the incident a “microcosm of the whole reaction to the pandemic,” claiming that the U.S. “did a bunch of things with tunnel vision, looking solely at, we’re trying to stop the spread, or we’re trying to do this or that, but not thinking about all the consequences.”
“This is not what a good physician scientist should be doing or a good scientist for that matter,” he said.
At another point in the discussion, Memoli criticized the NIH, claiming that it would pick a “winner,” meaning a theory or direction to funnel money toward. While he did acknowledge that he was “not involved in funding decisions,” he suggested there may be ulterior motives beyond public health.
“During the pandemic, it was all mRNA, right? And to some degree, we’re still talking about that,” he said. “So there’s like, a direction, and everything goes that direction. And what I don’t understand about that is, is that just somebody’s arbitrary decision? Is that some sort of financial decision that’s being made?”
Later, Memoli again praised Bhattacharya after he claimed that the Great Barrington Declaration’s strategy of deliberately pursuing mass infection of the “healthy” population to achieve herd immunity rapidly—a strategy slammed by public health groups and the World Health Organization’s director-general—was an “old pandemic plan.”
“What you’re really getting at is that for every recommendation a doctor makes, a free human being needs to make a decision if that’s right for them,” he said.
Memoli has long been a favorite of anti-vaxxers despite his long tenure in government for his vocal opposition to vaccine mandates in 2021 and views about the COVID vaccines. For example, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense, which hailedhim as “Top NIH Unvaxxed Scientist Willing to Lose Job and License.”
The piece was republished on the website of anarcho-capitalist and former John Bircher Lew Rockewell. Rockewell is famous for founding the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, which the Southern Poverty Law Center included in a 2000 report called “The Neo-Confederates.” The report notes that Rockwell was listed as a “founding member” on the website of the white supremacist, neo-Confederate group League of the South. The anarcho-capitalist is also known for his work for former Texas Congressman Ron Paul—specifically, as the founder and vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, which published infamously racist and homophobic newsletters.
Memoli’s ascension to acting NIH director was celebrated by Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker, who worked as an assistant to Rockwell in the 1980s and who is also named in the SPLC report as a founding member of League of the South. In a piece about the Trump administration’s communications freeze at critical public health agencies, Tucker, who has previously called the COVID vaccines Bill Gates’ “potions,” wrote that the doctor “remains in that position until the man once called a ‘fringe epidemiologist’ by the previous head of NIH takes full control.”
“This is as close to revolution and counterrevolution as you will find in a democratic society,” Tucker wrote.
