A Revealing Dialogue with a Former CDC Scientist

Note: this piece was coauthored with Martin Neil and Jonathan Engler

Dr Norman Pieniazek is a molecular biologist, geneticist, and epidemiologist with 147 publications in virology and parasitology. Before he retired, he spent 24 years working at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA. He has also spent time abroad including working in Spain and Poland.

We met up with Norman for what was planned to be a short meeting to introduce ourselves and informally discuss common interests around covid. However, this turned into a two-hour long, wide-ranging and fascinating discussion that touched on a huge number of topics.

Early on in the meeting Norman made the wise suggestion that we record and share the discussion. So, he hit the record button on Skype and we started again. The video, accessible below, is approximately two hours long. Be aware that, given it wasn’t planned as an ‘interview’ or for broadcast, it is largely unstructured. However, for those short of time here is a synopsis of the discussion with a focus on what Norman said (note that this synopsis is not a verbatim and true transcription of the conversation):

Pneumonia and early treatments

• The bacterial pneumonia hypothesis suggests that early treatment – hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and antibiotics – address bacterial infection. Norman confirmed bacteria is everywhere in our bodies including in the lungs, creating an ever-present potentially hazardous predisposition that, given the right circumstances, might cause a deadly bacterial pneumonia infection.
• Well-understood remedies such as the stockpile of antibiotics, as recommended by Fauci, were cast aside in 2020. Bacterial infection can cause sepsis hence we need antibiotics. A Cytokine storm is caused by bacterial infection in the lungs, filling them with fluid; this lowers the oxygen level in the blood because of poor lung function.
• In-person diagnosis by a physician based on physical symptoms was largely replaced by the PCR test, and with the rise in tele-health visits, social distancing, etc physicians stopped using stethoscopes to listen to a patient’s chest. This is an essential diagnostic tool to enable a doctor to audibly tell whether a patient has crossed the line into a bacterial infection which will then require antibiotics.

NPIs and Discarded Organisational Memory

• Norman knew Donald Henderson who coauthored a classic work on how to best respond to a flu epidemic. Henderson and colleagues did not recommend any of the NPIs that were followed during covid because of the obvious severe health, social and economic costs. (As an aside this work was coauthored by Prof. Thomas Inglesby at Johns Hopkins who attended Event 201 and, oddly, recommended NPIs be used for covid – the very same ones he had rejected previously).
• Orthodox immunology was ignored – herd immunity is a fiction given there is a ‘soup’ of constantly mutating coronaviruses.
• Why didn’t scientists at the CDC question things early in 2020? Work-from-home restrictions meant that people at CDC couldn’t communicate and coordinate to overturn the madness being imposed from the ‘sixth floor’ top brass. You could not isolate CDC from the HSS (Health and Human Services) and it was HSS that were calling the shots.

Wuhan, Bronchial Lavage and PCR

• The Wuhan scientists were on a routine ‘fishing expedition’ for coronaviruses and unusual pneumonias. Why was this work being done in Wuhan? It is easier to do in China because it is legal and because there are lots of hospitals, in a concentrated area, where the population is in relatively poor health. Also, it is easier to get permission to perform a painful bronchial lavage procedure on patients to obtain pathogens in China; this is much harder to do in the US. This procedure is done in the lower respiratory tract and guarantees higher quality samples than can be obtained using swabs, which really just measure the quality of the air that has entered your upper respiratory tract.
• To determine what pathogen is causing lower respiratory tract symptoms you should not use swabs and PCR. Why not? CDC acknowledges the inability of swabs to collect causative agents as reported by the EPIC study in these 2015 New England Journal of Medicine articles (one done on adults and one on children). Hence a positive result gained from a sample taken from the upper throat or the nose does not mean an infection is caused by the detected pathogen.

• In 2002-2004 SARS-CoV was not subject to mass PCR testing, yet SARS-CoV-2 was. PCR was used for SARS-CoV but only on samples taken using bronchial lavage, but NOT from swab samples taken from the nose or upper throat (This document presents evidence PCR was used to collect samples, but no mass testing was undertaken.).

Virus Origins – from Labs or Bats or Neither?

• Wu et al discovered WH-Human-1 using samples collected by bronchial lavage, and next-generation sequencing of the collected genetic samples, and ultimately reported it in GenBank.
• Before reporting on GenBank they published a preprint identifying the genetic sequences (Submitted (05-JAN-2020) Department of Zoonoses, National Institute of Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The first submission to GenBank had two subsequent revisions.), which was appropriated and found its way into the hands of Corman and Drosten, who then decided to exploit it for personal gain (via commercial PCR testing), fabricating a story about validating it against SARS-1. It was subsequently renamed SARS-CoV-2 (For a proposed timeline of events see here.).
• Norman thinks SARS-CoV-2 is simply a beta coronavirus (a cold), one of the many thousands of cold viruses that had remained undiscovered until 2020, but which have always been ever present in nature.
• SARS-CoV-2 cannot be a novel virus created in a lab or by natural zoonotic mutation. It is simply novel to detection (The supposed ‘novel and deadly’ attributes of the virus are discussed extensively here.). As soon as the EUA approved PCR tests started to be used the virus was simultaneously discovered in a number of disparate geographical regions. There was no evidence of sudden spread.
• In effect the results of any test are as much determined by the choice of test to apply as by the presence/absence of viruses. Norman says, “You will find whatever you want to find.” Hence people will be symptomless yet will have a lot of whatever viruses happen to be around in their nose or throat.
• The established taxonomy of viruses is unusable simply because there are so many unknown viruses circulating in the wild.

Vaccines

• The mRNA vaccine technology ended in a ‘garbage heap,’ because it is extremely toxic, and was rendered obsolete by protein subunit vaccines by 2019. So, the mRNA vaccines were doomed from the start. Subunit (protein-based) vaccines have been known since the late 1970s, but Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech needed a way to realise a return on their vast investments in mRNA. Hence the pandemic.

• Novavax is a protein subunit vaccine, based on the spike protein, which was available in August 2020 but did not get approval from the FDA. Although it is protein-based it will stay in the deltoid muscle injection site. It was however approved in Canada. It may not be very good for you (and ineffective against coronaviruses), but it is less dangerous than the mRNA vaccines.
• mRNA vaccines were found to be too dangerous for animals. Also, arguments that they are a safe basis for cancer drugs are based on lies. There is a competing technology called humanised monoclonal antibodies that cured former President Jimmy Carter from a melanoma that had migrated to his brain and there are now 500 versions of these drugs currently available.
• Norman was told that the patent on the flu vaccines, grown in eggs, expired in 2020. Hence there was little ROI in continuing with this technology.
• Viruses are in your respiratory tract and antibodies, responding to vaccines, are in your blood. These two things do not match well because the antibodies in the blood do not get into the lungs. The immune system ‘stays away’ from the complex respiratory system that deals with the thousands of pathogens we breathe in with every breath.

Antibody and Antigen Testing

• Are serology studies a pointless exercise? Because of wide variation between individual’s antibody measurement only makes sense by studying change in any single individual over time.
• Testing for antibodies means nothing because antibodies in the blood cannot travel to the lungs to react.
• Testing for antigens is a cheaper and less sensitive version of the PCR test with the same limitation.

Infectious Clones and Bioweapons

• Norman is very sceptical of a number of covid virus theories including those by Walter Chesnut and JJ Coey’s infectious clone theory, though they weren’t discussed in any great detail and were probably not characterised fully (or maybe even fairly).
• The issue with ‘infectious clones’ is that ‘you do not know what to create’ because there are millions of sequences of coronavirus so there is no ‘clonality’ and each one has 30 thousand nucleotides and there are combinatorically infinite changes you could potentially need to consider when creating a coronavirus⁵. It therefore isn’t possible to know what to change, via Gain of Function (GoF), to make the virus behave in more dangerous ways.
• As part of the ‘partnership for peace’ programme in 1994 Norman hired two ex-Soviet bioweapons scientists and asked them ‘How come you worked for 20 years and didn’t create any new deadly viruses?’
• They can create thousands of virus combinations, but the problem is how to test these creations. There is no way to test the billions and billions of possible changes to a virus and identify which changes to the sequence are ‘bad.’ You need the phenotype, and you cannot deduce the phenotype from the genotype. So how would GoF researchers – E.g., EcoHealth alliance – know exactly what to create?
• The claim that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons was groundless and this was confirmed to Norman by Donald Henderson who was involved at the time and who said it was not possible.
• Thus, GoF claims that changes to spike protein and furin cleavage sites make a virus more deadly are fiction. It isn’t possible and there is no proof they can produce deadly bioweapons. Those advocating this position and making these claims – EcoHealth alliance (Fauci, Baric, and Daszak) should get fired by their bosses for producing “not a tiger but a kitty.”
• We discussed Gulf War syndrome. Norman said people imagine anthrax is dangerous, but the ex-Soviet bioweapons researchers said to attack New York with anthrax would need 20,000 Boeing 747s flying over the city, dropping millions of tons of anthrax spores from a low height then people spreading it with shovels. The only way to infect people with anthrax is by direct means via an oxygen line or a direct injection.
• Norman said the Tokyo gas attack was successful in Japan because the terrorist used sarin, a nerve agent. The biological agents used, botulinum and anthrax, fortunately failed.

Fauci – the ‘Mean Midget’

• Within the CDC Fauci was called the ‘mean midget’ and during the AIDS epidemic he sunk Robert Gallo by inventing the story that Gallo had stolen the HIV virus from Luc Montagnier, thus destroying Gallo’s chances of being awarded the Nobel Prize (he was also denied a patent).
• Fauci is “not stupid, he is mean.” Fauci wanted to get a Nobel Prize, but he didn’t get a Nobel Prize for AIDS, so he wanted it for the Wuhan virus. In January 2023 knowing that he wasn’t going to get the Nobel Prize he “pulled the plug” and published this paper saying new types of vaccines are needed for respiratory infections, as an act of spite.

We learned a lot from Norman and are very grateful to him for giving us his valuable time. You will notice that we briefly discussed the vaccines, but you will be very pleased to hear that Norman has agreed to follow up with another meeting in early December to share his thoughts on this important topic (see here for a sneak peek).

You can access Norman’s other material on YouTube and Facebook (much of his material is in Polish and Norman speaks six languages!) His Twitter handle is @normanpie.

Republished from the author’s Substack