Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to rounding the news.
This is your weekly news roundup presented to you by rounding the earth and spoken to
you with you today by me, Liam Sturgis, your host.
I'm coming at you live from the very sunny Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and we've
got a very interesting show for you today.
I started a little bit later than expected, though Jen Slavin says, just in time.
I'm just pouring myself my Friday drink.
Well, Jen, you're going to need it.
So let's get into it, ladies and gentlemen.
And as always, let me know if the sound and video are working fine.
Today we're asking a question.
Who is David Bollware?
And as I put in the description, he's the most important man you've never heard of,
at least when it comes to COVID-19 early treatment.
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Hopefully he can pop back in and watch this very interesting deep dive.
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But folks, without further ado, this is going to be long.
So let's dive right in.
Today we're doing truly a deep dive into this gentleman right here, Dr. David Bullware.
Now he's come up in discussions over the last two weeks or so, as we've had round tables
and locals exclusive discussions around Remdesivir.
And we've talked a lot about Steve Kirsch and his role in things.
And it's time to go deep into this particular gentleman because he's had quite the impact.
So let's dive in.
Who is David Bullware?
Well, Dr. David Bullware, David R. Bullware was born in 1974.
He attended Wabash College, where he pledged Phi Kappa Psi.
His fellow fraternity brothers would later describe him as intelligent, humble, and well
balanced and able to balance academics, fraternity life, well, fraternity life and athletics too.
And as a member of the cross country team.
He graduated in 1996 with a bachelor of arts in chemistry.
He later attended the Indiana University School of Medicine, graduating in 2000.
He completed an internal medicine and pediatrics residency and an infectious disease fellowship
from the year 2000 all the way through to 2007 at the University of Minnesota, receiving
a certificate in tropical medicine from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
in 2006.
He completed his master's in public health in 2007 at the University of Minnesota.
Now also in 2007, Bullware became an assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious
disease and international medicine at the University of Minnesota's Department of Medicine.
And one of his very first projects, it seems, perhaps even before he was officially hired
in 2006, Bullware began working with the university's Center for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology
Translational Research under the leadership of one Dr. Paul Boanen.
Founded in 2005, CIDMT's stated mission was to discover mechanisms of pathogenesis that
can be translated into new treatments and strategies for prevention of infectious diseases.
Now more specifically, Boanen and his team were one half of a long-term collaborative
effort between the University of Minnesota and medical researchers in the African nation
of Uganda.
A 2008 article published in MinPost provides a summary of the origins of the collaboration.
And I quote, the story begins in 2003 when Dr. Paul Boanen came to Kampala to train African
physicians in the use of HIV medicine.
Boanen brought the wisdom of experience because he treats HIV AIDS at the University of Minnesota
Medical Center.
He also co-directs the University's Center for Infectious Disease and Microbiology Translational
Research.
In Uganda, Boanen met the full brutal force of the HIV pandemic.
It had killed nearly a million people, one in every 27 Ugandans.
A million more were living under its death sentence.
Their only hope for a reprieve was in HIV drugs, which were just beginning to trickle
in to sub-Saharan Africa.
Back in Minneapolis, Boanen recruited a colleague, Dr. David Bolware.
The University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center contributed $200,000.
More funding came from a philanthropic arm of the company TyboTech and the U.S. National
Institutes of Health.
Bolware and Boanen boarded planes for Kampala two or three times a year, staying two to
four weeks at a time.
Students and fellows from the university's schools of medicine and public health filled
gaps between their shifts.
Now, of note is the fact that the MinPost article acknowledges that the, quote, reporting
for this article was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington,
D.C., end quote.
Now the Pulitzer Center is itself, if you didn't know, funded by a number of organizations
who may find it in their interest to influence the way, generally speaking, in which infectious
diseases in Africa is covered in the media, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
the Meta, formerly Facebook, Journalism Project, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Omidyar
Network, Open Society Foundations, Planned Parenthood, Population Services International,
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Foundation,
and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, among others.
Now that was based on a list from 2022.
And of course it may be that the Pulitzer Center had different, less conflicted sets
of donors back in 2008.
Could be.
Now as described in that previous article, Bolware and Bohannan would travel to Uganda
two or three times a year, staying two to four weeks at a time, where they would conduct
research on the genetics of HIV-AIDS.
They would also run clinical trials on various therapeutics on sick patients at the partner
hospitals of the Infectious Diseases Institute.
Now the Infectious Diseases Institute, the IDI, operates out of Makarewe University in
Kampala, Uganda.
It was conceived in 2001 by a group that included noted HIV-AIDS researcher Merle Sandy, Makarewe
University School of Medicine Dean Nelson Suencambo, and Hank McKinnell, former CEO
and chairman of Pfizer.
Maybe you see why I choked on that.
This led to the formation of a non-profit organization called the Academic Alliance
for AIDS Care and Prevention in Africa, or simply the Academic Alliance, which then set
about founding the Infectious Diseases Institute in 2002.
Initial funding for the project came from Pfizer, distributed through a separate foundation
called the Pangea Global AIDS Foundation.
In the span of just a few years, the IDI would develop strong relationships with American
institutions including Johns Hopkins University, the Infectious Diseases Society of America,
and of course, Bolwer's University of Minnesota.
As previously noted, Bolwer and Bohannon's work with the IDI was funded by the University
of Minnesota, the National Institutes of Health, and a pharmaceutical company called TyboTech,
a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, which would later become Janssen Therapeutics, part of
the larger Janssen Pharmaceuticals brand.
But the IDI would very quickly find themselves on the receiving end of a tremendous amount
of money for a full range of activities.
Sponsors and financial supporters over the years include Abbott, the Eris Global TB Vaccine
Foundation, which by the way, for more on that, I highly recommend the recent work of
Mark Kulag over at Heusatonic Live, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Center for
Disease Control and Prevention, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, specifically their
Cooperative Biological Engagement Program, BioWarsfare, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation,
the European Commission, the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, or FIND, Gilead
Sciences, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, LADOS, a military contractor,
Massachusetts General Hospital, where by the way, Dr. Rochelle Walensky was working, Merck,
the Merieur Foundation, responsible for building the biosafety level 4 lab at the Wuhan Institute
of Virology, Microsoft Research, the National Institutes of Health, specifically the National
Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Division
of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or DAIDS, Novartis, Pfizer, President's Emergency
Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the President's Malaria Initiative, Rand Corporation, another
military contractor, Rockefeller Foundation, UNICEF, UNITAID, United States Agency for
International Development, or USAID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases, US AMRID, the United States Department of Defense, the University
of Washington, Welcome Trust, and the World Health Organization, just to name a few.
Jerry Alitalo in the Rumble Chat says, former CEO of Pfizer.
I said that right.
Yes.
So, Bolwer's focus during his time working with the Infectious Diseases Institute, which
is ongoing by the way, has been, quote, understanding the pathogenesis of HIV immune reconstitution
inflammatory syndrome, or IRIS, an important complication of HIV therapy that has recently
emerged with the rollout of antiretroviral therapy in Africa.
Specifically, he and his team have been, quote, prospectively characterizing the differences
in gene expression that occur over time among people who develop IRIS.
The objective is to identify the pathophysiology of IRIS, identify biomarkers for the prediction
and diagnosis of IRIS, and develop better treatments for and to prevent IRIS.
I just want to reiterate, this is something that is caused by HIV treatment, and I was
not able to identify if there was a specific HIV treatment that was causing all this.
But so far, the focus of his research seems to be responding to adverse effects to an
entirely new syndrome that is caused by HIV drugs.
And note this, Bolware's early interest in genetic medicine should not be overlooked.
Neither should the fact that his colleagues at the time also took particular interest
in mRNA as the mechanism for both the cause of HIV-related disease and how to potentially
treat it.
And when I say colleagues, I actually mean his superiors.
For example, Dr. Bohannan's profile from January 2009 explains, quote, one mechanism
that cells use to turn off gene expression is specific mRNA decay within the cytoplasm.
Dr. Bohannan is working to understand the biochemical mechanisms that regulate mRNA
decay and to understand the role of mRNA decay in regulating gene expression in disease states
such as malignancy, so cancer, or virus infection.
Meanwhile, the CIDMT co-director Mark Schleiss was, quote, engaged in the study of CMV vaccines,
specifically but not exclusively, purified protein subunit and DNA vaccines.
There's various publications arising from this work disclose funding from the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In 2009, he received a grant from GlaxoSmithKline for a project titled HIV Immune Reconstruction,
or sorry, Reconstitution Inflammatory Syndrome in Uganda, lasting until the end of 2015.
Now, from March 2015 to February 2018, Boulware acted as principal investigator on a project
at the Infectious Diseases Institute titled Adjunctive Certraline for the Treatment of
HIV-Associated Cryptococcal Meningitis.
The resulting study was published in August 2019 and found that the Pfizer-developed antidepressant
did not reduce mortality and should not be used to treat patients with HIV-associated
cryptococcal meningitis.
It also noted, well, just before I move on there, recall our discussion, Matthew and
I, our roundtable discussion with Kim Wichak, in which we go at length on about this sertraline,
a medication I myself have been on, and its more commonly known name, Zoloft.
Now, this study also noted support from the aforementioned Doris Duke Charitable Foundation,
which as I previously noted, with a slight correction, hosts former NID head Anthony
Fauci and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance director Afsena Beschloss, I know I pronounced that
wrong, on its Board of Trustees.
The correction is in my last video I said that Margaret Hamburg, former FDA commissioner,
was on the Board of Trustees, and what I meant to say was Afsena Beschloss.
Okay, BOLWARE began a, oh and there's the slide I put together for that.
Now, BOLWARE began a second trial in May 2016 titled Cryptococcal Antigen Screening Plus
Sertraline, or C-Assert.
Originally scheduled to run until April 2023, the trial was cancelled in late 2019 after
several Ugandan trial subjects suffered psychotic episodes associated with the sertraline, with
one lasting greater than four months.
Note, that sertraline, also known as Zoloft, is part of a class of drugs called Selective
Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, or SSRIs, a class which also includes a drug later explored
by BOLWARE for its effects on COVID-19 called Fluvoxamine.
Now, while BOLWARE has spent years swimming in the pool of HIV and AIDS research, his
real focus is on a condition called Cryptococcal Meningitis.
In a 2016 article published in Newsweek, BOLWARE describes it as, quote, so neglected that
it's not even considered a neglected disease, which is kind of funny.
Quote, it just gets lumped in with HIV, so no one sees it and no one really cares.
Now, the next paragraph of the article points out that the so-called neglected diseases
have benefited significantly from Product Development Partnerships, or PDP, for which,
as they note, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides the most funding globally, including
through public-private partnerships like PATH, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative,
and the TB Alliance.
But somehow, BOLWARE's niche disease wasn't seeing any of that Gates funding, or at least
not enough.
He advocates in this article in particular for a new at the time screening tool called
the Cryptococcal Antigen Lateral Flow Assay, or CRAG LFA, developed by a diagnostics company
called Immuno-Mycologics, or IMI, which, you know, it says, receives support from the Clinton
Health Access Initiative.
That's all very interesting, but the most interesting part of the article comes right
at the end, where Newsweek reveals that it too, eight years later, had created the piece
with funding from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Very interesting.
Now, one of BOLWARE's HIV studies at the IDI, published in December 2017, was featured
in the Joint United Nations Program on HIV AIDS, or UNAIDS, August 2018 report titled
Miles to Go.
This next section is titled Relationships with Pharmaceutical Companies.
In a presentation delivered at the 2018 Mycosis Study Group Education and Research Consortium,
or MSGERC, biennial meeting, BOLWARE discloses that he has received research funding from
none other than Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical company responsible for the development of
the drug we now know as remdesivir.
He also discloses acting as an advisor to Viomet and Minitronics.
Minitronics is a medical device company that didn't stand out to me as particularly interesting,
but Viomet Pharmaceuticals was a biotechnology company founded in 2005 by two researchers
out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern University.
Viomet, in their words, discovered and developed small molecule inhibitors of validated metallo
enzymes via an innovative and proprietary metal binding approach called metallophile
technology.
Metallophile is trademarked.
Viomet's investors included Astellis Venture Management, the venture capital firm of Astellis
Pharma, Eli Lilly's Lilly Ventures, and the Novartis Venture Fund.
On June 3, 2015, Viomet announced it had been awarded a $1.95 million grant from the United
States Department of Defense to develop, quote, a novel tropical antifungal agent to prevent
and treat mold infections as a result of battlefield wounds.
More specifically, they're referring later on, they clarify it is for the treatment of
valley fever.
In April 2016, the company reported co-owning six patents with the United States government
through the Department of Health and Human Services.
And of course, of particular interest to Dr. Bolware would be Viomet's drug called VT-1129,
which it had developed for treatment of cryptococcal meningitis.
Indeed, Bolware served as senior author on a study published in September 2016 that found,
quote, VT-1129 shows potential for use against fluconazole-resistant cryptococcus, for which
you receive funding from Viomet.
Now Viomet was acquired by NovaQuest Capital Management in January 2018 and was renamed
to Mycovia Pharmaceuticals shortly after.
So Bolware contributed as a site investigator for the Ambizome Therapy Induction Optimization
Clinical Trial or AMBITION.
It's a good word, ambition.
Investigating the use of Gilead's Ambizome or Ambizome, just Ambizome, in treating cryptococcal
meningitis published in the journal Trials in November 2018.
The trial was sponsored by Gilead, who happened to have also paid the senior author and at
least one other contributor to this.
The second last author, I believe.
So there you go.
Now returning back briefly to Bolware's 2018 presentation for a moment.
Let's see.
We also see in that second point that Bolware is proposing running clinical trials on a
drug called oral amphotericim.
You know, I should really look up how to pronounce some of these things before I go live.
Also to treat cryptococcal meningitis.
Luckily for him, he would receive that funding for this project from the National Institute
of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, or NINDS, in March 2019.
There was other funding involved as well from Matinus Biopharma, which we'll get to in
a second.
Phase one of this clinical trial titled ENCOCHLIATED.
ENCOCHLIATED?
ENCOCHLIATED.
Oral amphotericim for cryptococcal meningitis trial, or INACT.
It began at the Infectious Diseases Institute in Uganda on October 24th, 2019.
So as mentioned, as mentioned, amphotericim is an antifungal medication developed by a
biopharmaceutical company called Matinus Biopharma.
Matinus was founded in 2013 by Jerry Jabur and Abdel Fawzi.
Now this is where it gets interesting.
On January 10th, 2019, Matinus announced that it had entered an agreement with an undisclosed
pharmaceutical company to, quote, evaluate synergistic effects of Matinus's Lipid Nano
Crystal, or LNC, platform delivery technology with their partner's nucleic acid polymer
technology.
CEO Jerome Jabur said that the collaboration would, quote, provide solutions for companies
developing innovative nucleic acid polymers, small molecule drugs, vaccines, proteins,
and potentially even gene editing technologies.
Now what exactly is a Lipid Nano Crystal?
According to Matinus's website, their proprietary intracellular LNC platform is designed to
safely deliver a broad range of potent medicines, including small molecules, drugs with blood
level limiting toxicities, nucleic acid polymers, proteins, peptides, vaccines, and gene editing
technologies, end quote.
In other words, the LNC certainly seems very similar in premise and application to the
now very familiar Lipid Nano particle.
As used in the COVID-19 genetic vaccine products deployed by Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna.
The main difference, at least in terms of a sales pitch, appears to be in their, quote,
natural, non-toxic, and highly efficient spiral crystal with the unique ability to be administered
orally and through various other routes.
But the real shocker comes later down on the same webpage.
You ready?
So in December 2020, Matinus announced it had been tapped by the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to evaluate oral formulations of Gilead Sciences antiviral
drug remdesivir in its potential treatment against COVID-19.
But Matinus' good fortune from the pandemic didn't stop there.
On April 11, 2022, Matinus and BioNTech announced a research collaboration, quote, to evaluate
a novel delivery technology for mRNA-based vaccines.
Then in January 2023, Matinus and National Resilience entered into a material transfer
and evaluation agreement focused on exploring the potential for oral delivery of identified
nucleic acids.
Also in early 2023, the company sought funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Authority, or BARDA, and continued into its third project with Genentech.
Now it's unclear to me if Genentech was the mystery company first mentioned in 2019, or
if that company remains unnamed.
Now while BOLWARE was not, to my knowledge, involved in any of the above research collaborations,
of which there's a surprising number, they all occurred while he was actively running
his inact clinical trial.
And given that he has been on Matinus' payroll since just prior to the declaration of the
COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, the introduction of these new partnerships would begin to compound
the perceived or potential conflicts of interest for anything BOLWARE might touch related to
COVID-19 moving forward.
Of course, as we see on screen, by 2019 he had already disclosed having received research
funding directly from Gilead, and he disclosed this in a number of places.
Now note, of course, that all of the companies and organizations that we just went through,
all of them, every single one that Matinus describes as having all these new relationships
with are directly involved in the development, manufacturing, or deployment of the various
COVID-19 genetic vaccine products currently on the market.
NIAID co-developed Moderna's mRNA-1273 and owns the patented coronavirus spike protein
used in both Moderna and the Pfizer BioNTech products.
BioNTech needs no elaboration as the primary developer of the BNT162b2 product marketed
by Pfizer and all of its variations, including bivalent and so forth.
National resilience, I might remind you, is the CIA slash Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
linked manufacturer of synthetic RNA in the United States and up here in Canada, by the
way, particularly for Moderna's product, and it's co-led by a former FDA commissioner,
Scott Gottlieb.
And of course, BARDA, as we know, kick-started Moderna with substantial early funding, and
you might not know this, but Genentech did the same with BioNTech.
Well, the ENACT study is marked as completed on clinicaltrials.org as of February 15, 2023,
after all of that happened.
But we've come up to almost the present.
Now we look at his role in COVID-19 early treatment.
So at the outset of the declared COVID-19 pandemic, David Bolware was quick to jump
into action.
In an NPR article published March 31, 2020, Bolware points out that his, quote, normal
research is doing clinical trials in Africa for fungal meningitis of the brain, end quote.
But on March 9, 2020, chose to get his team together and spin up some clinical trials
for repurposed drugs to treat COVID-19.
And thus, Bolware began his work as the principal investigator for the first randomized control
trial, testing hydroxychloroquine for its use against COVID-19.
The trial, titled Post Exposure Prophylaxis or Preemptive Treatment for SARS-CoV-2, kicked
off on March 17, 2020, six days after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19
pandemic.
As Matthew Crawford has covered fairly well, funding for the trial was provided by Jan
and David Bazucki, by Steve Kirsch, the University of Minnesota Foundation, the Alliance of Minnesota
Chinese Organizations, and the Minnesota Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
Now those last two have some interesting threads to pull, but a different time.
David Bazucki, for those who still haven't heard, who haven't experienced Matthew's
reporting on this, David Bazucki is the creator of Roblox, a video game which saw, quote,
dramatic growth during the COVID-19 pandemic as children who were forced to stay home spent
more time playing games, end quote.
Now it also has a bit of a sex problem, as noted in a report from BBC News, outlining
various instances of sexual content in the game ostensibly made for kids, including a
so-called virtual sexual assault.
Very problematic image on screen right now.
And that's not to mention the various accusations of insider trading from former speakers of
the House of Representatives, but let's not go there today.
Now Steve Kirsch is certainly no stranger to the Rounding the Earth audience.
In fact, his name is coming up live in the chat as we go.
Ginger Sladki says, I hope Kirsch doesn't try to buy slash steal Liam now.
I'll let you know if he tries.
I kid.
But, Steve founded the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, CETF, in April 2020, in order to fund
trials on repurposed drugs, starting with, it seems, Bolware's trial on hydroxychloroquine.
Bolware later told MIT Technology Review that Kirsch was extremely helpful early on in the
pandemic, stepping up to fund early treatment trials when the US government would not fund
such studies.
Donors to the CETF included the Bazookies, Elon Musk, Mark Benioff of Salesforce, I believe,
Clint Serf, literally co-inventor of the internet, the Skoll Foundation, and Vanguard Charitable.
Now, despite the enthusiasm and name power of the trial funders, on June 3, 2020, Bolware's
team announced that they found that, quote, hydroxychloroquine has no benefit over placebo
in preventing COVID-19.
However, it is worth noting that the supposedly inert placebo in question was actually folic
acid, which is a rather strange choice given that folic acid has its own evidence of clinical
benefit in helping patients with COVID-19.
Now, that's been covered by some very intelligent people, but a little disgust point about this
first trial was that it also had a Canadian branch, co-led by the University of Alberta,
University of Manitoba, and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center.
Further funding for the Canadian branch came from the Bridge to Health Medical and Dental,
Manitoba Medical Service Foundation, McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and
Immunity, or MI4, McGill University Health Center, Northern Alberta Clinical Trials and
Research Center, Research Institute of St. Joe's Hamilton, and the St. Joseph Hospital
Foundation.
Now, look, I've spent a little more time than most of my American friends researching the
academic health networks here in Canada, as these were the institutions leading the charge
in our COVID-19 response.
One of these funders that I find particularly interesting is the McGill Interdisciplinary
Initiative in Infection and Immunity, or MI4.
Now, MI4 provided a significant amount of research funding towards projects related
to COVID-19 through their MI4 Emergency COVID-19 Research Funding Program.
I've selected just a few examples of the many funded projects.
So let's see, development of a new virus-like particle vaccine against COVID-19, real-time
tracking of COVID-19 vaccine development, ethical tensions of implementing research
during a crisis, understanding moral experiences of healthcare providers caring for patients
who are enrolled in COVID-19 clinical trials, expert and lay perceptions of translation
of COVID-19 treatment and vaccine development, success rate and timeline for development
of vaccines for emerging and re-emerging viral infectious diseases, COVID-19 vaccines, novel
approaches to tackle a novel disease, effective coronavirus pandemic and healthcare system
response on non-COVID-19 related mortality, post-pandemic myocardial infarction and heart
failure rates in Quebec, a collateral damage in this war?
And finally, health communication, social-cultural diversity and COVID-19.
Now, notably, MI4 announced in December 2020 that it had received a generous $600,000 gift
from Pfizer towards the creation of the Pfizer Early Career Investigator Awards.
How nice of them.
Okay, in June 2020, Gilead Sciences announced that their newly emergency use authorized remdesivir
would come at a cost of $3,120 per dose.
Just for comment, Bolware offered that from the health system perspective, if remdesivir
can shorten duration of hospitalization by four days, then the medicine provides a reasonable
value.
Hot take from Dr. Bolware.
But hydroxychloroquine wasn't the end of the line for David Bolware.
He also participated as a senior investigator in the Together Trial, a multinational clinical
trial platform launched initially by researchers in Canada and Brazil.
True to its name, the Together Trial really brought everything together under one roof.
In addition to its own hydroxychloroquine trial, which ran in Brazil, the international
investigators also tested HIV drugs lopinavir and ritonavir, the antidepressant fluvoxamine,
all-new purivir, which was Merck's experimental product, not a...
I suppose it was technically repurposed, ivermectin, inhaled corticosteroids, metformin, interferon
lambda, and doxazosam.
There's a couple of those I haven't heard of before.
Now, Bolware participated as an investigator in the ivermectin arm, and I believe that
also included a fluvoxamine element, which concluded that ivermectin is not useful against
the disease.
The New York Times quoted Bolware in their coverage of the study as saying, there's
really no sign of any benefit.
Now that people can dive into the details and the data, hopefully that will steer the
majority of doctors away from ivermectin towards other therapies.
Not sure what other therapies he's referencing.
Now the Together trial was funded by a whole lot of people, and that's for a further investigation,
but just on a cursory review of my notes, they were funded by the likes of the FTX Foundation,
as well as Elon Musk, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey,
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, tech entrepreneur Yuri Milner, Google co-founder Eric Schmidt's
Schmidt Ventures, and others through fast grants.
Okay, but that's still not the end, because finally, Bolware currently, as far as I understand,
serves as the national co-chair of the Trial Steering Committee for the National Institutes
of Health's Active 6 Platform Clinical Trial.
Here is just a quick tweet of Dr. Bolware speaking highly of the Active 6 trial.
Now Active 6, for those who don't know, and this was very interesting to revisit some
of my notes on this, Active 6 is part of the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions
and Vaccines Initiative, launched on April 17, 2020.
In its own words, Active is a public-private partnership whose executive leadership includes,
or in some cases I think included, Anthony Fauci, Peter Marks of the FDA, and Janet Woodcock,
formerly of the FDA, along with top representatives from Pfizer, Barta, and the FDA, among other
pharmaceutical companies whose treatments and tests were deployed during the COVID-19
response.
Furthermore, its preclinical working group includes Dr. Ralph Barak from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it is stock full of representatives from Pfizer,
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gilead Sciences, Merck, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline,
the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and Janssen.
I've heard, in fact, and I believe I've seen this in his resume, that one Dr. Robert Malone
is also still actively engaged in the active clinical trial platform.
Further research required.
But for today, let's move to conclude here.
In looking over the career of David Bolware, I see a familiar theme.
A man of passion and ambition working towards a successful career endpoint.
For Bolware, it's clear, Cryptococcal meningitis is what he always has come back to throughout
the course of his work, including during his work on COVID-19 early treatment trials.
But just like many others who found themselves in positions of influence in 2020, his own
ambition will always reassert itself.
And thus, it's understandable why he would make decisions, even passively, that favor
the advancement of his own research.
In this case, recall that Bolware's work from 2006 onward has been experimenting on
sick people in Uganda under the banner of the HIV AIDS pandemic, just like Anthony Fauci,
Rochelle Walensky, Margaret Hamburg, and many others who have sat in the seat of power.
There's a nice way to put that, and there's a realistic way to put that.
Realistically, the facility where he worked, where he still works, the Infectious Diseases
Institute was quite literally co-founded by a Pfizer CEO and funded heavily by Gilead
Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and various branches
of the United States government.
Those included Fauci's NIAID, Hamburg's Food and Drug Administration, Walensky's
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even Robert Malone's colleagues at the
Department of Defense's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA.
So both in the IDI and at home, Bolware's research funding came from NIAID, the DOD-funded
pharmaceutical companies he's worked with, and from Gilead Sciences itself.
The co-directors of his research institution have long focused on the genetic aspects of
viral infection, which naturally also includes the genetic aspects of the person infected,
and the genetic medicines to combat the disease.
It seems to me that through the perceived failure of repurposed drugs to manage the
COVID-19 pandemic, a wave of new technologies in genetic medicine have now been rolled out
to the global population and normalized under the misleading banner of vaccination.
Bolware's most recent funder, Matinus Biopharma, has benefited tremendously from this new reality.
While this has been simply an exploration and not something that I can reach a conclusion
based on, and I wouldn't want to without speaking with Dr. Bolware, it's hard to see
how he didn't walk out of this as a man much further along in his career, in large
part thanks to his role in quashing hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, et al.
But rather, and more importantly, the notion, simply the notion, that early COVID-19 treatment
existed at all in the early days.
In the presence of such treatment opportunities, companies like Matinus, National Resilience,
BioNTech, and Gilead Sciences, and Moderna would all be in a much different place right
now.
And, if there's any question as to how Dr. Bolware feels where he lands on these genetic
medicines, we need only turn to his own words.
For example, there's this tweet from September 17, 2022, where he says,
This sub-study of the University of Minnesota Medical School COVID out trial demonstrates
that having a COVID-19 vaccine booster prior is the best early treatment.
Never feel like you're being gaslit.
Nothing else reduces symptoms or resolves symptoms faster, even if at low risk of hospitalization.
Talking to you kids, get boosted!
Full disclosure, I added the talking to you kids part in there, just to be really transparent.
And then there's this hot take on following news that Moderna's flu vaccine didn't work.
The headline says, Moderna Flu Vaccine Delivers Mixed Results in Trial Shares Fall.
I quote, Moderna Inc. on Thursday, this is from by the way February 2023,
Moderna said on Thursday, its closely watched experimental messenger RNA-based influenza
vaccine generated a strong immune response against A strains of the flu, but failed to
show it was at least as effective as an approved vaccine versus less prevalent influenza B.
The results dashed investor hopes that the company might plug its COVID franchise decline,
sending Moderna shares down more than 6% in after-hours trading.
Dr. David Bolwer, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota Medical School
said, he was not overly concerned about the immune response versus influenza B.
Bolwer said the immune response against the A strains demonstrated that the vaccine probably
worked.
And Moderna's tweaks to the vaccine are likely to improve the response against the B strains.
I consider it pretty positive, he said.
Needless to say, Dr. Bolwer, I hope you're right about everything.
About the uselessness of the most promising early treatment protocols, about the safety
and efficacy of the various COVID-19 vaccine products, about it all.
Sadly, I don't think you are.
Ladies and gentlemen, this has been my special report on Dr. David Bolwer.
I hope I've answered some of your questions, and if you didn't have any to begin with,
I hope I've left you with even more.
But for now, thank you for joining me here on Rounding the News, brought to you by Rounding
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You can also go to roundingtheearth.substack.com where Matthew continues to publish excellent
articles on a variety of subjects, not just strictly related to COVID-19, but the bigger
picture, what he calls the plan demonium.
The economic factors, the socioeconomic factors, there's lots to explore beyond just infectious
diseases.
But for now, well, you can find me at liamsturgis.com where my album, Foreverland, remains available.
We're coming up on its one-year anniversary, and it's been a wonderful year of doing my
best to get my music out there in a very different world than when I started making that particular
album.
Well, you've been fantastic.
Thank you to everybody who's been tuning in on Rumble and Locals and Rockfin and Odyssey
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You guys are the best, and the show notes for this show will be available on roundingtheearth.local.com
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Stay tuned, and we will see you again very shortly.
Thank you.