Covid Response at Five Years: The Role of the Military

The first White House official to advocate for overturning American society was not Anthony Fauci; it was Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger.

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

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.

Rather than reform, however, Congress chose to grow the bioweapons machinery. Following 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act, Fauci received a 68-percent pay increase (making him the highest paid federal employee in the country) to “appropriately compensate him for the level of responsibility…especially as it relates to his work on biodefense research activities.” In 2002, he spearheaded a multi-billion expansion of Fort Detrick.

Meanwhile, Fauci and the US Government continued to funnel money to foreign groups pursuing gain-of-function research, such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it is now known that the Intelligence Community implanted spies.

Until 2020, the concept of a clandestine, supra-national bioweapons program would have sounded far-fetched to even conspiratorial minds. But the emergence of Covid threatened to unveil the illicit programs run by spymasters and the public health apparatus. In a desperate attempt to evade accountability, the Intelligence Community joined the cover-up of the lab leak.

The CIA offered bribes to scientists to bury findings refuting the “proximal origin” thesis led by Fauci, Farrar, Andersen, and Holmes, according to a whistleblower. The House Oversight Committee explained: “According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.” Then, however, the whistleblower reported that the “six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position.”

Meanwhile, scientists in the Department of Defense compiled significant evidence that suggested a lab leak. Like others, they analyzed the “furin cleavage” site and evidence stemming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But when they went to deliver their findings to the White House, President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, banned them from presenting their evidence or participating in a discussion on the origins of the virus.

In January 2025, following President Trump’s second inauguration, John Ratcliffe, the recently installed head of the CIA, announced that the agency believed that a lab leak was the most likely source of Covid. “I think our intelligence, our science and our common sense all really dictate that the origin of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News.

As outlined in “The First Amendment Versus the U.S. Security State,” the Intelligence Community was integral to the nation’s censorship crusade. CISA, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, was responsible for dividing the workforce into labels of “essential” and “nonessential” during lockdowns and then implemented a program known as “switchboarding,” where CISA officials dictated to Big Tech platforms what content was permissible or prohibited speech. Their contempt for free speech was indisputable. CISA Director Jen Easterly testified in Missouri v. Biden, “I think [it] is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts.”

Unrelenting, the Department of Homeland Security announced in April 2022 that it would establish a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was to be headed by Democratic activist Nina Jankowicz. According to Politico, Biden’s Ministry of Truth was charged with “countering misinformation.” The Ministry of Truth was only discontinued when the absurdity of its chief censor, Jankowicz, caused sufficient blowback from the public.

Further, the Intelligence Community’s influence extended to the highest levels of the White House. Beginning in January 2020, there was an insidious usurpation of the chain of command, and the civilian government was overtaken by a rogue band of military officials. That coup reached the National Security Council through a little-known official named Matthew Pottinger.

Matthew Pottinger and the National Security Council

Matthew Pottinger began his career as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal before enlisting in the Marines in 2005. He worked a series of assignments in Asia and later reflected, “Living in China shows you what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens.”

In 2017, he joined the Trump Administration as deputy national security advisor, and Politico described him as “the National Security Council’s top Asia hand.”

In 2020, as deputy national security advisor, he helped usher in a military junta that showed Americans what a nondemocratic country can do to its citizens. On January 14, Pottinger breached protocol by unilaterally calling the first interagency meeting on the coronavirus. On January 27, he again summoned officials in the White House Situation Room to address the coronavirus. While others called for measured responses, Pottinger advocated for travel bans and lockdowns.

In Nightmare Scenario, Washington Post reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb writes:

“Few people in the room knew it, but Pottinger had actually called the meeting. The Chinese weren’t providing the US government much information about the virus, and Pottinger didn’t trust what they were disclosing anyway. He had spent two weeks scouring Chinese social media feeds and had uncovered dramatic reports of the new infectious disease suggesting that it was much worse than the Chinese government had revealed. He had also seen reports that the virus might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. There were too many unanswered questions. He told everyone in the Sit Room that they needed to consider enacting a travel ban immediately: ban all travel from China; shut it down…[Pottinger] said that dramatic actions would need to be taken.”

The following day, Pottinger instructed his wife to text her friend Deborah Birx to meet him in the West Wing. “Matt got to the point quickly,” Birx wrote in her memoir. “He offered me the position of White House spokesperson on the virus.”

Three days later, Pottinger suggested lockdowns on the American public. He raised concerns of asymptomatic spread after reading Chinese social media sources. From the outset, he suspected the virus was the result of a laboratory leak, though his colleagues in the Intelligence Community publicly denigrated that thesis as “conspiratorial.” When health experts responded that there was no history of coronaviruses spreading through asymptomatic carriers, Pottinger increased his calls for drastic measures. Without any scientific basis, Pottinger advocated for universal masking, saying the policy had no “downside.”

According to Abutaleb, Pottinger asked, “What was the downside in having people cover their faces while they waited for more data and research about how effective masks might be?”

In “The Talented Mr. Pottinger,” attorney Michael Senger details the enormous control Pottinger had over the early response to the coronavirus, especially with respect to masking, travel bans, lockdowns, and hysteria surrounding “asymptomatic spread” of the virus.

While media sources and government officials berated critics to “trust the experts,” the leading proponent of lockdowns in the White House was a military alarmist with no understanding of epidemiology and a disregard for the chain of command. He was perhaps the most influential spreader of disinformation from the onset of the pandemic.

Senger summarizes Pottinger’s influence on the American response to Covid as a “singularly outsized role:”

“Pottinger may have simply been overly-trusting of his sources, thinking they were the little people in China trying to help their American friends. But why did Pottinger push so hard for sweeping Chinese policies like mask mandates that were far outside his field of expertise? Why did he so often breach protocol? Why seek out and appoint Deborah Birx?”

Beyond his influence within the White House, Pottinger and similar actors sowed panic over the novel coronavirus through the media. On March 7, 2020, Tucker Carlson drove to Mar-a-Lago to warn Trump of the disastrous effects of Covid, information he received from a “nonpolitical person with access to a lot of intelligence.”

Ten days later, Carlson explained his trip to Palm Beach to Vanity Fair:

“Well, in January is when we first started covering it on the show…And then I happened to be speaking a couple of days later to someone who works in the US government, a nonpolitical person with access to a lot of intelligence. He said the Chinese are lying about the extent of this. They won’t let international health inspectors in. They’re blocking WHO and this could infect millions of people, a high percentage of them. And this was a highly informed person, very informed, and again, a nonpolitical person with no reason to lie about it in either direction. So that really got my attention.”

During his trip to Mar-a-Lago, Carlson warned President Trump that he could lose the election over Covid and that sources with connections in China insisted that the virus was far more devastating than had been previously reported. Carlson’s source matches an exact description of Pottinger. He was a nonpolitical member of the Trump Administration with bipartisan support and access to the highest levels of intelligence. He had extensive experience in China and was adamant that the coronavirus would devastate society.

Jeffrey Tucker writes: “We should not underestimate the importance of this turn of events and the likely role of Pottinger in convincing Tucker of the case for tremendous alarm and panic. Without that, Trump might not have caved and the base would have rallied around him.”

And just before that alarm reached the public, the Intelligence Community and its liaisons positioned themselves to triumph amidst the forthcoming chaos.

In February 2020, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) was the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the most powerful and sought-after positions in Washington. His perch gave him access to information that remained classified to nearly all of his Senate colleagues. On February 13, 2020, as Burr received intelligence on the coronavirus (a full month ahead of lockdowns), he placed a 50-second phone call to his brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth.

Within minutes, Fauth called his stockbroker to begin liquidating his portfolio. Meanwhile, Senator Burr delivered public assurances that the country was “better prepared than ever before to face emerging public-health threats.” Behind closed doors, however, Burr prepared for economic and national disaster. After receiving nonpublic briefings on the emergence of the virus and the nation’s planned response, Senator Burr sold $1.6 million of stock from his retirement portfolio.

Around the same time, Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and her husband sold $20 million in stocks after attending a confidential briefing on the coronavirus. At the same time, they purchased stocks, including health care equities, that proved very successful in the coming months.

On February 20, 2020, the worldwide economic downturn began. On March 9, the Dow suffered what was then its fourth-worst day ever, with the market losing nearly 10% of its value. That crash was outdone a week later on March 16 when the Dow suffered its third-worst day ever and the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 12.9%. In April, the price of crude oil turned negative (meaning producers had to pay buyers to take barrels) for the first time in American history.

And so an illicit cycle of activities began at the behest of the Intelligence Community. Those with access to the levers of power sought to profit or advance their careers, and their incentive was to induce alarm and subservience from the citizenry.

It is now clear that a cabal, led by the National Security Council, violated the chain of command, misled the media, panicked the American public, and developed response plans before any elected official went through the channels of due process. It prompted the largest violation of civil liberties in American history, and it is traceable to the highest levels of the nation’s military. That junta then overtook the Covid response and the American government without anyone seeming to take notice.

The Military Takes Over the Covid Response

Weeks before the first stay-at-home order, the military ordered standby orders “to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law,” Newsweek reported. In February 2020, three contingency operations called upon the military to administer government operations by circumventing the US Constitution. Military commanders would be placed across the United States, and General Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy would lead the country as “combatant commander.” Dictator O’Shaughnessy never came to power, but the military community took charge of the Covid response behind the scenes.

Beginning in March 2020, the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security replaced the Department of Health and Human Services as the lead actors in the domestic efforts against Covid.

Their roles were not ceremonial; the military agencies were inseparably tied to the leading public health bureaucrats. Pottinger and the NSC were responsible for appointing Deborah Birx to the Covid response team. “We brought into the White House Debi Birx,” explained Trump’s National Security Advisor on March 11, 2020.

Without any announcement, the country’s leading military officials overtook the most widespread suppression of civil liberties in American history.

Government documents from March 13, 2020, showed that the National Security Council had taken control of the nation’s Covid policy. Five days later, President Trump invoked the Stafford Act, which made FEMA, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, the “Lead Federal Agency” (LFA) in the pandemic response, replacing the Department of Health and Human Services. From then on, HHS (including the CDC, NIAID, and the NIH) had no official leadership role in the response to Covid.

The week that the military replaced the health apparatus as the leaders of the Covid response coincided with the beginning of lockdowns on March 16. Representative government had ceased to exist in the United States. Americans had never heard of Robert O’Brien or Matthew Pottinger, but they were responsible for implanting the largest mobilization of government resources in world history. With hindsight, it was a clear and deliberate military operation.

The United States, meanwhile, had completed the construction of the first federal quarantine camp in over a century in January 2020, which the New York Times described as “just in time to receive 15 American passengers from the coronavirus-infested Diamond Princess cruise ship.” The Pentagon later announced that it would expand the facility, located in Omaha, Nebraska, in coordination with a slew of other federal entities, including the Department of Homeland Security.

In July 2020, the CDC published plans for nationwide quarantine camps, in which the US Government, led by the armed services, would forcibly isolate patients, ban them from social contact, and strip them of all physical access to the outside world other than the delivery of food and cleaning supplies. “The implementation of this approach will involve careful planning, additional resources, strict adherence and strong multi-sector coordination,” the CDC explained.

Underpinning this plan was the strength of the US military, which was charged with carrying out the Covid response. Thus, the existing government used the military to quietly restructure society, abolishing its constitution and its longest-standing freedoms. The results were tyrannical, nonsensical, and devastating. Soon thereafter, the military led the next crusade in the Covid coup.

The Department of Defense and Vaccines

In 1958, the US Department of Defense established the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to promote research and development of military-level technology following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik the previous year. In the ensuing decades, DARPA devised technology that laid the foundation for the internet, GPS, Agent Orange, and mRNA gene therapy.

In Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, Sharon Weinberger writes that DARPA’s “allure of applying the wizardry of science and technology to warfare” has made wars “more inviting” and “entangled the United States in a ‘forever war.’”

Following the 2001 terrorist and anthrax attacks, the Department of Defense began investing tens of billions of dollars into vaccines and medical initiatives. The Lancetexplains:

“Total US biodefense funding dramatically increased from ~$700,000,000 in 2001 to ~$4,000,000,000 spent in 2002; the peak of funding in 2005 was worth nearly $8,000,000,000 and continued with steady average spending around $5,000,000,000.”

In 2003, Dr. Anthony Fauci articulated his biodefense vision: “…the goal within the next 20 years is to have ‘bug to drug’ within 24 hours. This would meet the challenge of genetically engineered bioagents.”

The 9/11 response also paved the way for “emergency use authorization,” a designation from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that allows unapproved medical products to be used during a public health emergency. Harvard Law’s Bill of Health explains, “Ultimately, it was the War on Terror that would give rise to emergency use authorization.”

In the ensuing 20 years, the United States invested over $100 billion in the biodefense industry, including programs called “ADEPT” and the “Pandemic Preparedness Platform,” which provided the capital for the initial development of mRNA technology. In 2013, DARPA provided the initial investment in Moderna.

In September 2019, President Trump signed an Executive Order on “Modernizing Influenza Vaccines,” which directed government agencies, including the Department of Defense, to develop a “5-year national plan to promote the use of more agile and scalable vaccine manufacturing technologies.” Six months later, the pandemic response took center stage, and the Pentagon prepared to weaponize its biodefense infrastructure.

Later that year, the US Government entered into a vaccine manufacturing agreement with Pfizer and BioNTech. By July, the agreement encompassed a minimum of 100 million doses of a “vaccine to prevent COVID-19” and a payment of at least $1.95 billion. The agreement also allowed for the future procurement of hundreds of millions of additional doses. Investigative journalist Debbie Lerman writes: “That’s a lot of money for a lot of items, especially since the vaccines had not yet been tested, approved, or manufactured to scale and, as the agreement stated, were purely ‘aspirational.’”

In the following months, “Operation Warp Speed” only increased the role of the military in an initiative that ostensibly came from the private sector. In November 2020, the New York Times described how “the role of the military has been less public and more pervasive” in the Covid vaccine response than Americans realized. The article recounted how the Defense Department acquired facilities, raw materials, permits, and medical supplies for the vaccine manufacturers and orchestrated supply chain management, distribution initiatives, and “every logistical detail you could think of.”

Pentagon planners considered every potential disruption to the project, but the government deliberately hid the involvement of the military from the public. “Concerns about conspiracy theories surrounding the vaccines are even more reason to keep the military out of sight,” the Times explained. The Chief Operating Officer of Operation Warp Speed, Four Star General Gustave F. Perna, had to manage disgruntled public health officials who complained “that the military’s role in Operation Warp Speed was too large,” according to the Times.

But the Defense Department’s influence was not limited to procurement or logistics; it was central to the approval and dissemination of the shots. The Harvard Law Bill of Health explains that for emergency use authorizations, “[t]he record indicates that Congress was focused on the threat of bioterror specifically, not on preparing for a naturally-occurring pandemic.”

Debbie Lerman writes: “Here’s the kicker about EUA: because it was intended to be issued only in war and WMD-related emergencies, there are no legal requirements for how it is issued, beyond the determination of the FDA that such authorization is appropriate. No legal standards for how clinical trials are conducted. No laws regulating the manufacturing processes. Only ‘reasonable beliefs’ based on whatever evidence is available to the FDA at the time that it makes its determination.”

Thus, the Department of Defense used the infrastructure of emergency war powers stemming from the PATRIOT Act to evade traditional testing and safety protocol. Once Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar invoked the PREP Act, the Department of Defense and the FDA were able to begin vaccine rollouts under emergency use authorization.

This had critical downstream effects. Notably, the FDA did not require any safety efficacy data from clinical trials to authorize the EUA, and any clinical trials related to the EUA process were not required to comply with any regulatory standards. Coupled with the nearly all-encompassing immunity granted to vaccine manufacturers, every incentive encouraged rushing a flawed shot to the market.

By June 2021, the United States Vaccine Adverse Effective Reporting System (VAERS) reported 4,812 deaths from the Covid vaccine as well as 21,440 hospitalizations. In January 2023, VAERS exceeded one million adverse events reported from the Covid vaccine as well as 21,000 deaths (four times as many deaths as VAERS has recorded from all other vaccine reports combined since 1990), with 30% of those deaths taking place within 48 hours of vaccination. In the following years, regulatory agencies and studies belatedly acknowledged vaccine injuries, including blood-clotting, myocarditis, reduced sperm count, Guillain-Barre syndrome, facial paralysis, tinnitus, and death.

American citizens felt it from the beginning; some sense that normal law was no longer in operation. The whole of society, in many countries, was experiencing something closer to martial law. There were only orders, not legislation. The orders were often cast as recommendations but enforced as mandates. The lines of authority were scrambled and confusion reigned throughout, with fear replacing rational judgment.

It was always unclear precisely who was in charge, and that became more apparent when the President himself started posting wishes for a return to normalcy on his social media accounts. Was he not in charge? In many ways, no; the military was running the show from behind the scenes, using public health agencies as cover.

Of all features of the Covid response, this is the one that remains least explained, least explored, and least understood. That is because vast amounts of the documentation, from the lockdowns to the countermeasures called vaccines, still remain cloaked under the cover of being classified.

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