Covid Response at Five Years: The Role of the Military [Article from 8/3/25]

The year 2020 introduced a barrage of previously obscure phrases to the forefront of the American lexicon. Social distancing, PCR tests, misinformation, mRNA platforms, remote learning, Zoom school, lockdowns, super-spreader, net zero, Juneteenth, epidemiologists, BIPOC, and so on. In the onslaught of new terms and cultural norms, Americans lost sight of a simple question: who was in charge? 

There were debates about the influence of Fauci and the tension between state and federal initiatives. Right- and left-wing media distracted the citizenry with sensational headlines about proles killing grandmas, celebrities singing John Lennon, and nurses choreographing dance routines. Amid the manic news cycles, nobody seemed to know who was responsible for the mass mobilization of government resources.

At its core, the Covid response was a military operation. It uncovered the entangled webs of ostensibly distinct structures of military and health operations. The National Security Council sparked the panicked response, the Department of Homeland Security oversaw lockdowns, the Intelligence Community, led by the CIA, censored dissent, and the Department of Defense administered the vaccine push. 

Contingency plans involved martial law, not nationalization of hospitals. The first White House official to advocate for overturning American society was not Anthony Fauci; it was Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger. Taken as a whole, the military apparatus overthrew the civilian government. It was a bloodless coup.

The CIA’s Role from the Outset

In January 2025, journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that a CIA spy worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through 2019 and 2020. According to Hersh, “The asset, highly regarded within the CIA, was recruited while in graduate school in the United States.” In 2019, the spy warned that “China was doing both offensive and defensive work” with pathogens, and that there had been a laboratory accident that resulted in the infection of a researcher. 

As Dr. Fauci led the movement to publish the “proximal origin” paper, he also used the power of America’s clandestine services to silence potential critics. Fauci began taking secret meetings at CIA headquarters “without a record of entry” in order to “influence its Covid-19 origins investigation,” according to a whistleblower (though Fauci has denied those claims). “He knew what was going on…He was covering his ass and he was trying to do it with the Intel community,” the whistleblower told Congress. “He came multiple times and he was treated like a rock star by the Weapons and Counter Proliferation Mission Center.”

Fauci had long bridged the worlds of public health and American spycraft. After the terrorist and Anthrax attacks of 2001, the United States became preoccupied with biosecurity to protect against bioweapons, pandemics, and chemical attacks. At Fort Detrick, Maryland, which historian Stephen Kinzer describes as “the Army’s principal base for biological research,” the spy world developed “the nerve center of the CIA’s hidden chemical and mind control empire.”

The FBI later determined that the 2001 Anthrax attacks came from a lone, disgruntled Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Ivins (though law enforcement did not charge him until after he committed suicide in 2008). That theory has faced intense scrutiny from figures across the political landscape, including Christopher Ketcham, Glenn Greenwald, and the National Academy of Sciences. But all agreed that the Anthrax came from inside the United States Intelligence Community. 

Francis Boyle, a professor of law at the University of Illinois who drafted the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act signed by President George H.W. Bush, argued that a full review of the evidence from the 2001 Anthrax attacks would have “led directly back to a secret but officially sponsored US government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal,” specifically citing potential involvement from the Pentagon, the CIA, and public-private partnerships. 

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