By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.

On September 30, 2025, the image of Albert Bourla standing in the White House beside President Donald J. Trump stunned large segments of the public. The moment instantly became a lightning rod, drawing condemnation and confusion from those who remembered the unresolved - and in many cases, still unaccounted for - devastations of the Covid-19 response.

My inbox, and those of others who have worked to expose the record, flooded with a single question, usually framed in rage or betrayal: What the F*?

This piece is not an apology, nor an attempt to launder history. We must hold multiple truths at once. What happened in 2020 and 2021 was a global institutional collapse, and many of the facts still buried beneath academic soft-pedaling or regulatory capture are not only real - they are documented.

The 95% efficacy figure behind Pfizer's original mRNA vaccine - marketed with urgency and without full transparency - was the result of a methodological sleight of hand. The trial protocol only counted cases beginning seven days after the second dose. That choice excluded early infections, skewed efficacy upward, and generated headlines that conditioned the world's response. This is not speculation. It is a matter of record in the trial design published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The case-counting window bias - a form of immortal time bias we've termed the Lyons-Weiler/Fenton effect - was not reported, disclosed, or corrected by regulators, the sponsor, or the academic authors. It was never subjected to adverse scenario modeling. It is still cited.

Other elements of the Covid-19 response defy benevolent interpretation.

The spike protein sequence appearing in Pfizer's patent holdings prior to public awareness of SARS-CoV-2; the credible findings by Kevin McKernan and others of plasmid DNA contamination in mRNA vaccine vials, including SV40 enhancer elements; the lopsided prioritization of vaccine deployment over therapeutics like ivermectin and fluvoxamine; the use of high-cycle threshold PCRs without Ct reporting, which amplified false positives; and the refusal to distinguish properly between "died with" and

"died from" - these are not conspiracy theories.

They are failures. The ethics of care collapsed. The financial incentives prevailed.

The charge that some hospitalists used sedation and early ventilation not out of necessity but to clear beds or reduce infection liability cannot be dismissed out of hand. Ventilator-era mortality was catastrophic. Retrospective chart audits suggest secondary bacterial infections were rampant, often untreated, and that many patients were coded for Covid when sepsis or bacterial pneumonia was the true cause of death. Whether this was manslaughter or negligence is a question for the courts.

But morally, we must say plainly: lives were ended for reasons that had nothing to do with care.

In my view, the evidence of Albert Bourla's opportunistic stock sale - what many rightly call a pump-and-dump - is also real. It is a matter of public record that on November 9, 2020, the same day Pfizer announced top-line results from its pivotal vaccine trial, Bourla sold over 130,000 shares of Pfizer stock under a pre-set Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted on August 19. The optics were indefensible.

While technically legal under the rules at the time, the maneuver benefited directly from nonpublic material information about vaccine performance - information withheld from the broader public until after markets opened.

No ethical oversight committee reviewed it. No internal justification was disclosed. Just a silent cash-out on the back of news that moved markets globally. The SEC has since tightened Rule 10b5-1 to avoid these abuses, but Bourla's behavior happened under the old rules, and that should not be forgotten. It remains on the record, and it remains unresolved. I want to remind everyone that all options against Bourla the man, and Pfizer the company, are ...