I’ve broken more scoops than I realized

Much of my work's not typical journalism but “citizen research.” While I didn’t “break” all of these stories, I was the first to report many of these events and tried to raise awareness of key events.

I think I was the only journalist in the world who picked up on the fact that the first “confirmed” cases of Covid in America could/should have been two crew members of The USS Theodore Roosevelt, who had Covid symptoms before the ship left port on Jan. 17, 2020. They both later tested positive for antibodies.

While I call myself an independent journalist, a more accurate description might be I’m an independent or “citizen” researcher.

Instead of interviewing news sources for feature stories, I spend most of my time researching other stories and then reporting on interesting facts/observations I’ve uncovered in this research.

Almost all research items I’ve written about have never been highlighted in the mainstream press. I also write opinion essays where I try to explain to readers why I think these bits of information are significant.

Today, as I approach my third anniversary as a Substack author, I’d like to itemize a sample of the more noteworthy findings I’ve uncovered on my own or tried to highlight for readers. I’ve written about many of the items summarized below, but others haven’t yet been developed into a full story.

I think all subjects mentioned below deserve more attention than they’ve received.

Did 30 percent of sick Americans already have Covid?

A doctor emailed his/her state health agency and reported that, per this doctor’s opinion, 30 percent of this doctor’s patients had already had Covid by the dates of the lockdowns.

To this day, it remains unknown if state health agencies and the CDC ever seriously considered the possibility eye-opening percentages of sick Americans could have already had Covid by the lockdowns.

I’ve still yet to find one convincing story that shows one “healthy” child in Alabama has died from Covid in the last five-plus years.

The Alabama Department of Public Health (and the CDC and the NIH) wouldn’t tell me if any of their own employees had died from Covid in the past five-plus years. The ADPH spokesperson cited HIPAA reasons; the other two agencies ignored my questions and didn’t reply.

One specialty: Highlighting interviews that never happened …

The CDC never interviewed one person (out of 109) who tested positive for Covid antibodies after giving blood to the Red Cross in December 2019 and January 2020.

The CDC and Navy never interviewed one sailor on the USS Theodore Roosevelt who tested positive for antibodies April 20-24, 2020. Note: Sixty percent of crew members who volunteered for an antibody test tested positive. Another Question: Why did the CDC and Navy test only 382 of 4,800 sailors (less than 8 percent of the crew)?

The CDC and Navy administered antibody tests to crew members of only two U.S. Naval vessels. The Navy fleet has more than 400 ships.

As far as I am aware, I’m the only journalist or researcher in the world who found compelling evidence that at least two crew members of the USS Roosevelt had Covid before that ship left port on January 17, 2020. This would mean, based on symptoms and positive antibody results, these sailors could have been viewed as the first “confirmed” Covid cases in America.

Per my research, it takes only two or three days to test a tranche of archived blood for antibodies. Still, the CDC needed almost one year to publish results of its Red Cross antibody study (when the blood had been collected as early as Dec. 13-16, 2019). Amazingly, I might be the only journalist who ever asked why it took a year to publish the results of such an important study.

I’ve noted that public health officials who are constantly wrong usually get big promotions and receive numerous honors and awards.

Brandie McCain, who was very sick with Covid symptoms in December 2019 and later received three positive antibody tests, told me that she left at least two messages with Dr. Karen Landers of the Alabama Department of Public Health, asking Dr. Landers for someone with the ADPH to call her and investigate the possible early Covid cases of she and her husband.

Brandie told me she never received a return phone call from the employee who was later promoted to Alabama’s “chief medical officer.”

A little-mentioned anecdote about Dr. Fauci’s successor …

The successor to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the NIAID was Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, formerly the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

While at UAB, Dr. Marazzo led the national trials to use remdesivir as a common treatment for hospitalized “Covid” patients. Many skeptics of the Covid authorized narratives believe this drug (later nicknamed “Run! Death is near!”) contributed to or caused the death of many thousands of patients. UAB received at least $37.5 million in NIAID grant money to lead these trials.

In 2020, al.com honored Dr. Marrazzo as an “Alabamian who made a difference.” I think Fauci’s successor “made a difference” in murdering thousands of Americans.

Update: RFK, Jr. quickly “re-assigned” Dr. Marrazzo, who was offered a job doing medical research on Indian reservations.

If you want to read some textbook yellow journalism …

In April 2020, NJ com reported that Belleville, NJ Mayor Michael Melham had gone public with his belief (note the headline: his “unfounded claim”) that he contracted Covid in November 2019.

The article said that the governor’s office and NJ Department of Public Health had been contacted with a chance to comment and never replied. The news organization and the reporter who reported this detail never followed up on why public officials in New Jersey wouldn’t interview Mayor Melham or follow-up on the possible first confirmed Covid case in the world.

A columnist at NJ.com later wrote a column vilifying Mayor Melham for making such an outlandish and obviously false claim. (For connoisseurs of yellow journalism, this article is definitely worth reading (Please see column here).

All the News that’s Unfit to Print …

In late April 2020, a New York Times’ paid subscriber reported in the Reader Comments of this newspaper that he had severe Covid symptoms in the early fall of 2019 and had received two different positive antibody tests from two different northern California labs, clinics he named.

I emailed the “news tip” address of the New York Times at least four times telling the newspaper this was a potentially narrative-changing story, which should be investigated.

In my emails, I pointed out the paper must have “Shane from Marin County’s” full name, his address and his email address - info he no doubt provided when he subscribed. Needless to say, America’s paper of record never followed up on my “news tip.”

***

Lewis Kamb, then a reporter for The Seattle Times, wrote several excellent and important “early spread” articles for this prominent newspaper in May 2020. One story reported that two Washington residents who’d experienced obvious Covid symptoms in December 2019 later received positive antibody tests administered by a University of Washington lab.

Not long after he wrote these stories, I emailed Mr. Kamb and told him I’d written a similar story about an Alabama couple (Tim and Brandie McCain) who also fit the exact same profile (except Tim McCain almost died). I sent Kamb a link to my UncoverDC story about the McCains and asked him if he’d be interested in doing a follow-up story on this Alabama couple (a story that corroborated his earlier reporting).

Kamb did respond to one email, saying he was busy working on stories on the George Floyd riots. But Kamb did ask me one question about the McCains’ possible early cases:

“Do you know if this couple had recently been to China?”

I did know this answer.

“No, they had not,” I replied.

That was the last I ever heard from this reporter or anyone from The Seattle Times, which, for some reason, quickly dropped its “early spread” stories.

***

On Page 1 of its newspaper in May 2020, The Palm Beach Post reported on 11 residents from DelRay Beach, Florida (all from the same subdivision) who’d all tested positive for Covid antibodies after experiencing Covid symptoms in November and December 2019.

The same article reported that one “private” lab in DelRay Beach had administered 500 antibody tests between March and early May 2020. Forty percent - 200 tests - came back positive. The manager of this clinic said these test results had been shared with The Florida Department of Public Health.

The same paper reported that The Florida Department of Public Health would not reveal how many positive antibody tests had been reported to this agency.

Note: The Palm Beach Post also quickly dropped its “early spread” stories and no reporter or editor followed up with me on the new information I repeatedly shared with its editorial staff.

*** (Reader shares helped me grow my Substack reach.) ***

These schools closed for a reason, right?

According to a paper (written by CDC employees) published in The Lancet, 2,886 U.S. schools “closed due to illness” between November 2019 and the end of February 2020. This figure was 258 percent greater than the mean number of school closings in the previous seven flu seasons and 45.4 percent greater than the flu season of 2017-2018, said to be the worst flu season in America in the past 40 years.

Authors of the paper didn’t write one sentence seeking to answer the question of why an unprecedented number of schools would have closed due to ILI outbreaks in the weeks and months right before “official Covid” in America.

***

I certainly didn’t break the news that many visitors to the October 2019 World Military Games in Wuhan became sick with Covid symptoms, but I quantified the large numbers and presented stories and links that strongly suggest this information was intentionally concealed from the public.

Recently, I belatedly published stories that strongly suggest the January 2020 Sundance Film Festival was a Covid “super-spreader” event and another story pointed out that at least six Americans in six different states had died from Covid by January 2020, according to official death certificates.

Other topics …

As I confirmed in my own interview, embalmer Richard Hirschman has never been paid for reporting his claim that “40 to 50 percent” of the bodies he’s embalmed since mid-2021 had never-before-seen white, fibrous clots or coffee-ground “dirty blood” in them.

Journalists working for mainstream news organizations, who have not written one story about this phenomena, are paid salaries and benefits. Employees of “fact-checking” organizations like Media Matters and NewsGuard are also paid.

Two Questions: What financial incentive does Richard Hirschman have to lie? Do these salaried “truth-seeking” reporters possess a financial incentive to conceal the truth or blacklist taboo stories?

Dr. Phillip McMillan scored one of the great alternative-media exclusives when a “cath-lab manager” came on his podcast and reported hospital employees were extracting “3 to 10” white fibrous clots from living patients every week. While I didn’t break this story, I’ve done my best to bring it to the attention of more readers.

Full disclosure needed …

I recently learned (from a reader who asked Grok) that the Alabama Department of Public Health has spent at least $3 million in the last five years on advertising to promote vaccines.

In Alabama, the news organization that has received the most vaccine advertising dollars is al.com (The former Birmingham News, Mobile Press-Register and Huntsville Times). Question: Shouldn’t this news organization reveal this pertinent fact in every vaccine-promotion story it publishes?

I asked the media spokesperson for the SEC athletic conference how many college athletes who had to be tested weekly for Covid with a PCR test were asymptomatic at the time of their positive results?

The spokesperson said he didn’t have this information and HIPAA requirements would prevent him from disclosing this information if he did. (I also asked media reps for the ACC, Big-10, Pac-12 and Big-12 the same question. None replied to my query. It seems to me academic research institutions would be very interested in ascertaining such relevant Covid data).

The SEC spokesperson did confirm that no SEC student athlete had died from Covid. (I’m almost certain none was ever hospitalized).

I think I am the only person in the country who reported that Pfizer is a corporate sponsor and “partner” of the SEC and all its academic institutions. I couldn’t find out how much it cost to become an official sponsor or partner with the SEC, but, based on research of other sponsors, I think the figure is a commitment of at least $10 million/year.

I keep trying to expose the hypocrisy of brave, truth-seeking reporters …

I’ve emailed at least eight journalists with al.com and asked them if they would write a feature story on Alabama residents Richard Hirschman (the most famous whistle-blowing embalmer in the world) and Lt. Col. Theresa Long, the best-known whistleblower in the U.S. Military. Nobody, including two former Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalists, has ever replied to my story suggestions.

***

As far as I can tell, not one member of President Biden’s cabinet, nor his vice president, ever expressed any alarm over any possible cognitive issues affecting our former “president.”

By now most pundits have written about Biden’s obvious dementia, but few wrote about this topic as early and as often as I did. I’ve written at least eight articles on Biden’s obvious dementia and cover-up of same, including one article on Sept. 22, 2022 - nine days after I started this newsletter.

Kamala scandals were also off-limits …

As far as I am aware, no journalist ever asked vice president Kamala Harris when she learned her husband had impregnated the nanny of his children and if he might have tried to cover-up up this scandal, perhaps by getting his former mistress a house in a tony East Coast community and job with a subsidiary of Amazon.

I’ve added my two cents on Epstein …

Per my Epstein research, two FBI agents interviewed the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre about her claims she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and, in 2011, Virginia gave these agents the original photo of her and Prince Andrew, allowing the agency’s experts to determine if the photo was fake.

The FBI has never said this photo was fake nor that Giuffre was lying. Our government clearly knew all about Epstein’s sex-trafficking and extortion operations years before he was finally charged with a crime.

Curious Substack metrics …

I’ve probably been in the vanguard of Contrarian Substack authors who’ve taken note of significant and curious changes in Substack metrics in the last year or so.

From analysis of my own metrics, I discovered that for the first nine months of my Substack newsletter, I averaged 14.5 new subscribers every day. For the past 50 days, I am averaging losing 1.4 subscribers every day.

In the last 11 months, I’ve gone from 311 paid subscribers to 268. Instead of reaching 1,000 paid subscribers toward the end of next year (which I was on pace to do for nine months), I will no doubt have fewer than 200 paid subscribers by the end of 2026.

For context, in a period of approximately seven months, Robert Reich went from approximately 400,000 Substack subscribers to more than a million subscribers.

Paul Krugman went from no Substack subscribers to more than 430,000 in approximately half a year.

Curiously, many of the best-known “Covid Contrarians” (including myself) don’t show up in any of Substack’s curious “leaderboards.”

Questions I’ve previously asked, or am asking today - questions that haven’t been asked nearly enough …

Why would Jeffrey Epstein, a man who grew up in Brooklyn, buy the largest ranch in New Mexico?

President Clinton’s statement about Epstein said Clinton had no knowledge of the “crimes of which Epstein was convicted.” Epstein was only convicted of two crimes - including “solicitation of a prostitute.” It’s a given Clinton probably wasn’t present during the commission of these two specified crimes.

A better question would be was Clinton aware of any possible crimes that Epstein wasn’t charged with or wasn’t convicted of committing? When it comes to the Clintons, one has to parse their statements very carefully.

Has any reporter ever investigated what health conditions Hillary Clinton might have been suffering from in the 2016 presidential campaign? Also, why didn’t “Crooked” (intoxicated? or ill?) Hillary” address her loyal supporters on election night?

As of September 2025, has one former classmate of Barack Obama come forward and confirmed that, yes, he or she saw Obama every week in a class at Columbia?

Has anyone seen the applications Obama made to get into Harvard’s School of Law School or to become president of the Law Review? Do these documents, perhaps, say he was born in Kenya?

J-6 and the worst insurrection in U.S. history …

Why haven’t law enforcement officials arrested anyone for planting two pipe bombs on January 6?

Congress reconvened on the evening of January 6, 2021 and, early in the morning of January 7th, certified the presidential election results. Question: How could such a vote be possible a few hours after the “worst insurrection (since the Civil War) in U.S. history?”

Ashli Babbit (5-foot-2, 115 pounds) was shot and killed by a member of the Capitol Police Force. The notion that Babbit posed an imminent, life-threatening risk to any armed police officer is hard to believe. Still, she was killed and the officer who killed her suffered zero sanctions. Of note, Babbit was the only person killed as a result of injuries suffered in this protest.

And Ray Epps, the man who encouraged as many people as he could to go to the Capitol and then go inside the Capitol received a slap on the wrist five years after he served as one of many instigators of this extremely curious event.

I hope I’ve helped a few other Substack authors …

I’ve also tried to raise awareness of important Substack authors who didn’t have nearly as many readers as they deserve, like this creative citizen journalist from Finland who went from 87 subscribers to more than 1,000 after I wrote about his smart project to confirm the wide-spread existence of the “embalmers’ clots.”

***

Saturday will be my third anniversary as a Substack newsletter author. I’ve greatly enjoyed my work as a “citizen researcher” and hope my readers and subscribers also found a few of my articles interesting or noteworthy. Per the mission statement in my initial column, my goal with this newsletter was to challenge conventional wisdom I believe is likely false. I hope I have done just this.

Writer gratuities via Ko-Fi.