Dr. Robert Malone, a scientist, physician, and author, said he was “entirely emotional” after seeing an undercover video by Project Veritas in which a Pfizer research director claimed the company’s scientists are talking about mutating the SARS-CoV-2 virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”
“The buried lede in all of this is that it is an implicit acknowledgment that Pfizer is not able to produce the product that would be necessary to get out ahead of this virus and allow people to be protected using a vaccine,” he said.
“What is being said is an implicit acknowledgment that the products aren’t working, and they can’t make them work without going to extraordinary measures of these genetic manipulations, which they hope might solve their problem of getting out ahead of the virus evolution.”
“So you’re [hypothetically] engineering something that has the killing potential, the destructive potential equivalent to a major nuclear warhead. And it is sitting in a bench environment in which, if anybody makes an inadvertent mistake ...
“You know, anything can happen. One small event—inadvertent—one single point of failure can lead to the entry of a lethal pathogen into the general human environment and we have seen how quickly that can spread. That’s why—this logic—it is wrong, it is fallacious, it is deeply flawed. This analogy, ‘What’s wrong, if so long as they’re in BSL4 [biosafety level 4],’—BSL4 can go bad in so many ways.”
He went on:“You can have a brief power fluctuation, so the air pressures are no longer equalized, and suddenly, things that are a positive pressure to keep the virus in is suddenly reversed. Somebody can inadvertently throw a switch [to] open a door. [Someone could] tear a suit, you know, [or] a monkey can throw feces ... or sprays urine, this is what monkeys do.
“People get inadvertently infected in these facilities all the time. And to say that this is benign—the only people that could say that would be the ignorant. Anybody who has worked in any of these facilities is familiar with what goes wrong and what can go wrong.”
Malone also expressed that he was emotional and “stunned” by Walker’s personality.“I mean, this is somebody who is in a position to profoundly influence our—all of our lives,” Malone said, adding later in reference to the kind of research Walker spoke about: “He’s just joking about it. He shows absolutely no signs of remorse, except for the caveats—caveats that he says, ‘Well, please don’t tell anybody this,’ you know, in a kind of a conspiratorial way.”
‘Profoundly Disturbing’
In the undercover video, Walker told the Project Veritas journalist: “Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them.”Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. Malone, a pioneer in mRNA technology development in vaccines, shared his understanding of Walker’s statement from a technical perspective.
“He’s talking about modifying domains of the virus,” Malone said. “And he’s talking about serial passaging in monkeys ... and serial passage, this infecting one monkey and then taking virus from that monkey and putting it into another, into another, into another, demonstrates—this is what bothers me the most—it demonstrates an immunologic naïveté at Pfizer. Remember, this is a senior Pfizer executive responsible for strategic planning.”
“What they seem to believe is that they can generate mutant viruses ... and then somehow obtain viruses that are more pathogenic, or more infectious, that are escaping vaccination,” Malone added. “And then once they’ve developed those—then they can potentially develop a vaccine against those. So what they’re really talking about is attempting to accelerate in a more controlled environment using monkeys instead of humans—which have very different immune systems—so that they can anticipate the evolution the virus is going to take.”
Malone said that the situation is like a “self-licking ice cream cone, where they create the problem and the solution at the same time and then sell us the solution once the problem either manifests or somehow inadvertently ends up in the general population, such as happened in Wuhan.
“This is profoundly disturbing. Even just the fact that this gentleman would joke about this is profoundly disturbing.”
Pfizer’s Response
Following the release of the Project Veritas video on Jan. 25, Pfizer ignored multiple queries from The Epoch Times and other news outlets before it issued a statement on Jan. 27, in which it denied having “conducted gain of function or directed evolution research” in the “ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.”However, Pfizer noted that in the assessment of Paxlovid, an antiviral drug used against COVID-19, the company carries out laboratory tests “to identify potential resistance mutations” to nirmatrelvir, which is one of the two components of Paxlovid. Here, Pfizer noted that “[i]n a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.”
Pfizer did not make any mention of Walker in its statement, and as such, neither confirmed nor denied that Walker was or is a Pfizer employee.
Pfizer also did not explicitly dispute the claim by Walker that its scientists are discussing mutating COVID-19 viruses to preemptively develop new vaccines.
While Pfizer specifically denied that it is engaging in gain of function or directed evolution research in developing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, the company did not deny that it may be engaged in such research in general, including in relation to other potential COVID-19 vaccines that do not bear the Pfizer-BioNTech designation.
‘Directed Evolution’ Versus ‘Gain-of-Function’
Walker, in the initial undercover video, denied that the kind of research he was referring to would be characterized as “gain-of-function,” and instead called it “directed evolution.”“You’re not supposed to do gain-of-function research with viruses. Regularly not,” Walker said in the video. “We can do these selected structure mutations to make them more potent. There is research ongoing about that. I don’t know how that is going to work. There better not be any more outbreaks.”
But for Malone, the terms refer to similar or the same things.
“This is really parsing of words or substituting one set of words for another that really are equivalent—or if they’re not equivalent they are so close to each other as to be irrelevant,” Malone said.
“Technically, one could define gain-of-function research—which by the way is poorly defined—as only involving the insertion of a new genetic element into a virus, you could define it that way. Or you could define it in the more normal way: Anything that you do in mutating a virus genome, to cause it to have different properties would be gain of function that is gained and different properties, by definition, and in his case, he’s talking about obtaining different immunologic properties,” Malone said.
“But what he’s trying to do is substitute a more benign term for one that has become very widely understood to be wrong—to be illegal—in the United States. And he’s making a joke out of it. And he’s clearly acknowledging in the video that the two things are really the same functionally.”
Malone speculated that “for purposes of PR for Pfizer, it appears that [Walker has] been instructed to use the term ‘directed evolution’ in lieu of the term ‘gain-of-function.’”
Malone noted that Pfizer’s Jan. 27 statement said its scientists “have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”
