Editor’s Note: The documented Ariel Fernandez’s scientific refutation of NIH/ORI findings is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21541140

Initially skeptical, Ariel Fernandez learned about the COVID-19 cover-up the hard way, as he became the first voice that challenged the official narrative on the origin of the pandemic in a scientific publication and subsequently felt the brunt of the NIH censorship.

In violation of the statute of limitations, the Office of Research Integrity at NIH (ORI) resurrected a case closed or silent for fifteen years against Prof. Ariel Fernandez, issuing findings of research misconduct. As rubberstamped by administrative law judge Margaret Brakebusch (decision CR6690), the ORI resurrected a case dating back to 2010 and has now found that ten of his published papers contained invalid results. Prof. Fernandez claims the assertions by ALJ Brakebusch and the ORI/DHHS are wrong, nefarious and unfounded. According to his disclaimer, he is willing to provide the exculpatory evidence on any specific charge to anyone that gives a sound reason to request it.

ORI posted on their site that their findings of research misconduct followed an investigation made at Rice University. Nothing can be further from the truth. ORI violated the standards and the statute of limitations. In the Settlement agreement of July 15, 2010, Rice disavowed their submission to ORI, offered to help Ariel Fernandez find a position elsewhere and compensated him for his departure in amicable terms, so ORI had no basis to pursue an investigation. Fernandez played along with ORI in the hopes he could get them to listen to reason even though he knew it was part of the Covid coverup.

This case is not about scientific data, it is about the massive COVID-19 cover-up to conceal the true origin of the pandemic, which Ariel Fernandez exposed when he identified in a paper the blueprint of SARS-CoV-2 as a gain-of-function lab product. Nobody described Fernandez’s case better than senator Josh Hawley (R.-Mo.) in a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing. Hawley identifies Ariel Fernandez by class, not by name: NIH was so intent on destroying anyone opposing the narrative that COVID was a natural occurrence precisely because of NIH’s role in funding gain-of-function research at the lab. In his paper, Prof. Fernandez reported precisely that SARS-CoV-2, the agent causative of COVID-19, is a product of gain-of-function modification. Therefore, his reputation had to be tarnished and NIH found a way to do it: Weaponize ORI to resurrect a closed case against him, a case dormant for more than a decade.

In her decision, ALJ Brakebusch stated that it is an “undisputed fact” that Fernandez falsified experimental data while he held the Karl F Hasselman Professorship at Rice University. Nothing can be further from the truth. Prof. Fernandez is a theoretician who relied on collaborations with experimentalists to validate his hypothesis. To prove the genuine provenance of the data from Lilly Research Laboratories, Fernandez offered the certification of Dr. Sangtae Kim, Vice President of the company at the time. To prove the validity of the questioned experimental results, Fernandez offered the expert testimony of Prof. Ridgway Scott from the University of Chicago, and presented the affidavit testimonies of his former doctoral students at Rice University: Drs. Sridhar Maddipati, Xi Zhang and Jianping Chen, and that of his collaborator Dr. Axel Blau. To prove that the synthetic chemistry of wrapping compounds reported in his works was valid, Fernandez offered the official certification of the University of Wisconsin-Madison-Small Molecule Facility signed by Dr. John Feltenberger, a specialist in the systhesis of the wrapping compounds designed by Prof. Fernandez. To prove that the whistleblower Abhinav Tiwari was lying, Prof. Fernandez offered the testimony of Sean Sessel, an undergraduate at Rice at the time, working is the same project as the whistleblower.

To picture the level of dishonesty, venality and sheer stupidity of ALJ Brakebush’s decision CR6690, it suffices examine the following section lifted verbatim directly from her ruling: 

He [expert Scott] further added “it seems that ORI is beating a dead horse with a broken whip. They should be strongly criticized for raising these false issues.” Id. He concluded his statement by asserting:

“It is personally disturbing to me to see such a poor quality of analysis emerging from ORI. ORI has access to everyone in the field to provide expert opinion. But they seem to have found a very weak group of scientists in this case. This reminds me of my teaching days. I saw behavior like. this, but not from the good students. I cannot give ORI a passing grade in this case.”

While Scott extensively discussed his opinion regarding what he felt to be ORI’s erroneous findings, he provided no proof to support Respondent’s assertions that the experiments or research data in issue were produced by Lilly.

   How can this expert opinion not constitute a material dispute of facts sufficient to prevent any judge from granting summary judgment to ORI? Why should the expert that was supposed to assess the validity of the results also prove provenance? This was the call of the Vice President of Eli Lilly. Brakebusch is obviously completely clueless. She is as clueless as she is dishonest.

 These actions expose the NIH-sponsored COVID-19 cover-up and are calculated to impair the US Government efficiency and destroy the value of its reports. Under 18 U.S.C. section 371, the ORI/DHHS has defrauded the United States Government by depriving it of its lawful right and duty to promulgate accurate information officially acquired in the way dictated by law or departmental regulation.

Brakebusch and ORI are both in the DHHS payroll. The implication is that the appeal is a travesty of justice. In her decision, Brakebusch applied the high standards of her alma mater, the University of Memphis, rejecting all evidence and witnesses presented by Prof. Fernandez, including an expert testimony by a chaired professor from the University of Chicago and all members of Fernandez’s group at Rice University. Brakebusch is the third ALJ that heard the case. Previously, Judges Carolyn Cozad Hughes (12/2022-2/2023) and Karen Robinson (2/2023-12/2024) could not bring themselves to adjudicate on such colossal nonsense.

The attack on Fernandez’s reputation is part of the NIH censorship instigated beginning June 5, 2021 (exhibits below) by Peter Daszak, the NIH contractor who subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and, ultimately, by Anthony Fauci, the former head of NIAID. These attacks constitute acts of NIH corruption associated with the COVID-19 cover-up concerning the true origin of SARS-CoV-2. As it has been made public (*), the cover-up involved the suppression and censorship of dissenting voices that opposed the official narrative that SARS-CoV-2 was a natural occurrence of zoonotic origin. Ariel Fernandez became the first such dissenting voice in a scientific publication. This is evidenced by his paper published on May 27, 2021:

Ariel Fernandez (2021) Molecular Biology Clues Portray SARS-CoV-2 as a Gain-of-Function Laboratory Manipulation of Bat CoV RaTG13, ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters 12, 941.

This work portrayed SARS-CoV-2 as the result of a gain-of-function modification purposely designed to produce a bioweapon. The following paragraph suggested for the first time in a published paper that SARS-CoV-2 had been designed as a bioweapon:

“An indicator that the NIH-funded research had gone too far arose when the tinkered CoV-RaTG13 became endowed at the spike protein with a “detonator”, that is, a cleavage site recognized and activated by the host-cell enzyme furin … This site has not been identified in other CoVs from the same lineage.” 

It is worth emphasizing that the furing cleavage site was first characterized as the smoking gun by Ariel Fernandez in May, 2021. By September 2021, the unfunded D.A.R.P.A. proposal Defuse by Peter Daszak et al. became known to the public. This proposal served as blueprint to create SARS-CoV-2 and corroborates what Ariel Fernandez had already stated regarding the furin site as the smoking gun. The following paragraph is lifted from the DEFUSE proposal (HROO111850017 EcoHeath Alance (Daszak):

The paper by Ariel Fernandez was immediately perceived as a threat by NIH. The paper came out on May 27, 2021 and by June 6, Peter Daszak was frantically demanding its immediate retraction, as shown in the exhibits below. The next day, NIH threatened Ariel Fernandez directly, demanding the withdrawal of the paper. The paper was not retracted because there was nothing wrong with the data. Only an expression of concern was issued. This outcome was unsatisfactory: Ariel Fernandez had to be censored because his publication challenged the official narrative on the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. To implement the COVID-19 cover-up, the ORI was weaponized. The ORI issued a charge letter against Fernandez by August, 2022, in a case that had been closed for over a decade: Ariel Fernandez had to be discredited, like anyone else who challenged the official narrative. This takes us to the begining of the story.

​(*) Hearing on COVID 19 at the Senate/HSGAC. Date: June 18, 2024:
Senator Josh Hawley stated that “Every dissenting voice raised against the [COVID-19] natural origin was suppressed as per Fauci’s intructions” (1:32-1:36). “The fraudulent Nature Medicine paper [on the natural origin of COVID-19] was used by Fauci to mobilize government to censor people”. “People lost their job because of this, they were discredited” (1:37). At the same venue, Senator Rand Paul said: “[Francis] Collins [NIH’s former president] and Fauci ordered everybody who disagreed with the natural origin of COVID-19 should be taken down” (1:54).

FURTHER READING

Dr Ariel Fernandez’s Report to the Office of the Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services: Whistleblower Retaliation Associated With the COVID-19 Cover-up. Subjects: Office of Research Integrity (ORI/DHHS), Peter Daszak, ALJ Margaret Brakebusch https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22212450