DOMINIC Cummings wants regime change. ‘To the max’, he says. His opening salvo came, without any hint of irony, last Armistice Day. Alleging there’s been a ‘criminal cover-up’ by a network of official scientists headed by Dr Anthony Fauci, Cummings said on X: ‘The Fauci network should be rolled up & retired en masse with some JAILED.’ [His emphasis]
Claiming the ‘old regime lied and destroyed trust’, Cummings called for the incoming Trump Administration to publish ‘ALL hidden information on the covid vaccine’ and ‘ALL the files on covid, lab leak, funding of gain of function, Fauci, the international correspondence on lab leak including with leading UK scientists and government.’
The news of outgoing President Biden’s pre-emptive pardon for Fauci, backdated to early 2014, will surely have come as a disappointment to Cummings, but what’s he really after? He’s calling on the Trump administration Mark 2 to inform on its prior incarnation.
Cummings’s belief is that Whitehall is blocking an investigation into ‘how and why’ Boris Johnson was given ‘monumentally false advice and encouraged to pass on this duff advice to the world’ over the ‘lab leak’ theory of SARS-CoV-2 origins. [His emphasis] He’s had a public gripe with the Cabinet Office since January 2024 over one page of his Covid-19 Inquiry Witness Statement having been redacted by the Cabinet Office on ‘national security’ grounds. ‘When I checked with the Inquiry they confirmed this means that the judge also will not see such redactions – even though the joke Inquiry fought legal action to get access to private messages on the basis it needs all information to judge the “general context” of decisions’, wrote Cummings, adding: ‘Clearly this does not include absolutely critical information on “general context” that would embarrass Whitehall.’ [All emphases are his]
Evidently, there is information that Cummings is aware of that is not in the public domain which he sees as being in his interests to be publicly known. Call it an insurance policy against any future criticism over his role in pushing the Prime Minister into putting the entire country under house arrest, while simultaneously enabling pharmaceutical interests and their academic partners to avail themselves, like pigs at a trough, of lavish public subsidy. All for the greater good, of course. For a pyromaniac anarchist such as Cummings, the pandemic was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experiment from the centre of power, with his pre-formed vision for government reform and the loosening of procurement rules he desired to achieve it. Once all the guardrails were removed because it was an alleged emergency, all the risk taken to unleash enterprise and deliver science-led economic growth could be socialised while the eye-watering corporate profits were privatised.
The ‘monumentally false advice’ and embarrassing critical information Cummings appears most interested in are the ‘lab leak’ theory and the Proximal Origins paper which was organised by Sir Jeremy Farrar in February 2020 to promote his preferred SARS-CoV-2 origin story, that it was a zoonosis: an animal virus that evolved naturally to infect humans. In retrospect the very idea that an inert piece of genetic code encased in protein incapable of surviving outside a host cell has a preference for survival in any particular living species is another unexplained oddity. Nevertheless the objective was to restrict questions about SARS-CoV-2 to those two options. This excluded closer examination of other possibilities: flu had been rebranded to create a profit bonanza for pharmaceutical companies; that there was no new virus but that via the nocebo effect people’s own minds, stoked by fear, were making them sick; or the most sinister, that there had been an intentional release of a lab engineered virus in China by people outside China who were already developing countermeasures.
‘Whitehall’s top scientists and the top intelligence officials walked into the PM’s office and told the PM and me that lab leak “is definitely false” and “a conspiracy theory”,’ says Cummings. Ever the contrarian, he says he knew they couldn’t have been right because ‘James Phillips, a scientist and original “weirdo & misfit”, said to me: their confidence is totally misplaced, there are MANY highly suspicious signals – and he was clearly right.’
Cummings doesn’t name the top Whitehall scientists in question but presumably Lord (Patrick) Vallance, then the Chief Scientific Adviser, wasn’t amongst them. Sir Jeremy Farrar says in his book Spike that on January 31, 2020, the day after the World Health Organization (WHO) finally wrung a recommendation to issue a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) declaration out of its emergency committee at the third time of asking, it was Vallance who informed the UK intelligence agencies of suspicions, raised the day before by Dr Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute in California, that the virus was laboratory-engineered. By informing the intelligence agencies Vallance elevated the Chinese pneumonia outbreak to a biodefense and national security threat, activating the preconditions for the use of Regulation 174 to authorise an unlicensed vaccine to stop the spread of a pathogen. Farrar says Fauci informed US intelligence the same day and for good measure the Australian government were informed by Dr Eddie Holmes, the man who publicly released the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 on January 10, a day before the China Center for Disease Control made it public.
Vallance was the prime mover of the Vaccine Taskforce inside government. He convened a ‘preliminary Sage meeting’ on January 22, while the WHO preliminary field visit to Wuhan was already under way, in the expectation that the World Health Organization would declare a PHEIC. Then, says Farrar, on January 27 Vallance convened his first meeting on developing vaccines and therapeutics.
Another proponent of the lab leak version of the origin story is President Trump’s newly confirmed Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe. He served as director of National Intelligence for the final year of Trump’s first term when corona-madness gripped the world. Soon after Ratcliffe’s confirmation, the CIA said that they believed SARS-CoV-2 arose due to a lab leak from Wuhan although they described this assessment as ‘low confidence’.
The lab leak story has Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance as the arch-villains funding dangerous research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who were responsible for it leaking because they had poor biosafety standards. This framing is favoured and promoted heavily by former Assistant Secretary for Preparedness & Response (ASPR) Dr Robert Kadlec who has been industriously muddying the waters since he left office in January 2021 having successfully delivered his Manhattan Project for Biodefense which we know as Operation Warpspeed.
Under international law, countermeasures, even medical ones such as the now widely used but inadequately tested mRNA ones the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) designed and which Moderna and BioNTech commercialised for them (they license the same patent from the NIAID), may be used only in response to an illegal act by a foreign state. The lab leak is a cover story, but it’s an important one that needs to be maintained at all costs.
Cummings appears to remain as convinced now as he was in 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab leak and therefore the lockdowns and the Vaccine Taskforce that he was so intimately involved with were justified. While he appears to remain unable to see that launching a new mode of gene therapy vaccines was the entire object of the exercise, an X post on December 11 suggests that he has a further grievance. Having said that the Vaccine Taskforce wouldn’t have happened without him and Vallance forcing it on the Cabinet Office he wrote, ‘The old regime jabbers nonsense about “disinformation” – the true disinformation is the old regime working with the vaccine companies & some official scientists to HIDE data that we PROMISED would be published.’
Cummings is suggesting that an aspect of the agreement that he had with Vallance when the Vaccine Taskforce was set up has been abandoned. He believes the withholding of certain information is having ‘catastrophic effects on trust in vaccines and science in general’. I don’t know exactly what information he’s after, but I’m intrigued. The FDA has already released all the data from the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine trials after a successful court challenge. The data that is being hidden with the complicity of the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is real world safety data. Perhaps he’s seen the light and is trying to get out of the path of the oncoming train.
