(Also see “Part 1: The ‘Evils and Designs of Conspiring Men’ in Light of Book of Mormon Teachings,” Jan. 3, 2025.)

Is the Word of Wisdom Growing Less Relevant?

The Word of Wisdom is viewed by some as a cultural relic of a Church that once fretted over trivial issues like what kind of beverages were sinful. Too many have trivialized its message and purpose, seeing only the debate over a few details and not the principles being taught. It is a subtle revelation with overlooked warnings and guidance, a revelation that directly impinges on vital modern issues pertaining to science, health, and society. Like many of the revelations the Lord has given us in the Restoration, including the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Proclamation on the Family, this Word of Wisdom, Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants, can be “likened” to our present situation (1 Nephi 19:23).

What makes the Word of Wisdom “a principle with promise” that can benefit even “the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints” (v. 3)? How does it “show forth the order and will of God in the temporal salvation of all saints in the last days” (v. 2)? Why should it be sent and received with “greeting” (v. 1) rather than annoyance?

Like the Book of Mormon, the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants, including the Word of Wisdom, show that God’s love and concern for us extends to more than just the next life. He cares about our happiness now and how we use and care for our bodies. He gives us teachings and revelation to help bless our families and communities so we may avoid some of the physical threats that we may face. The Word of Wisdom gives us principles for health and warnings to help us avoid the evils of “conspiring men” (v. 4), just as the Book of Mormon exposes the workings of secret combinations—not to depress us in corrupt times, but to motivate us to oppose them so “that evil may be done away” (Ether 8:26). Just as we can benefit by applying the Book of Mormon’s warnings on secret combinations to help us oppose and expose them, so we also need the Lord’s guidance and warnings on health-related issues for our physical protection, even for our “temporal salvation … in the last days” (Doctrine & Covenants 89:2).

In parallel with the pervasive Book of Mormon theme of opposing secret combinations, we may wish to ponder the Lord’s concern about the “evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days” (v. 4) that motivated Him to warn and forewarn us by revelation.

In Part 1, “The Word of Wisdom and the Science of Secret Combinations,” we considered the relationship between the Book of Mormon’s nuanced teachings on “secret combinations” and the dangers of the Word of Wisdom’s “conspiring men.” In exploring how they posed a serious danger to human health already in 1833, we looked at the booming opium trade in Joseph Smith’s day as one way to understand how health-related evil designs could affect the world then and now. Such connections build upon a recent series in Meridian Magazine on secret combinations in the Book of Mormon (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4), a study that examines the motivations, tactics, cultural impact, and disastrous outcomes of secret combinations. That background may help us apply the Word of Wisdom to current health-related threats. The Word of Wisdom’s intersection with modern science, including dietary science, medical science, and pharmaceutical science may be important, as well as the corruption of science that can occur.

When Real Science Is Usurped by Idolatry

Christians may often discuss science and its occasional clash with religion, but do we consider what happens when “science” becomes religion, as in an idolatrous cult?

Real science is based on the scientific method in which questioning is essential. Observations and data are used to probe and revise reigning paradigms in an ever-tentative quest for knowledge. Real science is a limited tool for understanding some aspects of the physical world by testing the validity of hypotheses based on evidence. It is not a tool for obtaining power over others or governing society.

In contrast, those seeking power and gain may use science as a political tool, claiming that their grab for power is based on “science” and requires faith in the authority of science, which means their authority. Marxists or others seeking for totalitarian power, for example, often paint their approach as “scientific,” such as the “scientific socialism” spoken of by Frederick Engels or the many references to the “scientific” nature of Communism that I heard during my years in China. When government or other groups use science to obtain or maintain power, science to them may be a justification for unlimited authority. Such science, in my opinion, is just as “religious” as the many forms of religion they may oppose. It can be viewed as the “Cult of Science” that makes gods of human works and human authority figures. That cult demands faith that is often blind or blinded.

The Cult of Science may have some of the trappings of real science and flashy “high priests” who are authority figures with scientific or medical degrees and P.R. crews. However, it is revealed as an unscientific “cult” by its emphasis on authority and the censorship of those who question its claims and commands. It is about gaining power, not knowledge. It is inherently unscientific and deceptive. It may be similar to what Paul referred to as “science falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20), noting, though, that the Greek work translated as “science,” gnōsis, is most commonly translated in the KJV New Testament as “knowledge,” not necessarily scientific knowledge.

In contrast to real science, the Cult of Science shuns questions, debate, and transparency. It shames or censors those who dissent. Conflicts of interest and inconvenient data are hidden. Ultimately, it demands unearned trust in its authority, pressuring others to trust and comply.

The modern Cult of Science has parallels to the goals and operations of ancient secret combinations in the Book of Mormon in which corrupt men collaborate for gain and power. What the Book of Mormon teaches us about secret combinations employing corrupted religion and other institutions of power may guide us in understanding the dangers that might occur with modern “scientific” idolatry.

One of the many Book of Mormon teachings that resonates with modern insights into secret combinations (e.g., criminal organizations and plots) is that such groups have a corrupting influence on society and its institutions (Helaman 4:22; Ether 9:6). Institutions such as the judiciary or religion or groups such as merchants and lawyers can be compromised. The spread of wicked influence across organizations society can continue until they obtain “sole management” of a government (Helaman 6:38–39).

Religion was a key tool for influencing society in the ancient world. The Book of Mormon accurately portrays not only how important religion was and how closely religion and government were often linked, it also shows how dangerous it was when religion became corrupted by secret combinations. Nephi’s concern about the future “great and abominable church” can be understood, in light of the Book of Moses, as “the abomination of corrupt secret combinations that gain the political power to do the evil works Nephi opposes” (see Part 1 of the series on secret combinations). As described in Part 3, the treasonous Zoramites, who supported the Gadianton robbers, are characterized by corrupt, proudful religion in Alma 31. After Noah spent three days “counseling” (or scheming) with his wicked priests, he found a way to justify executing the prophet Abinadi (Mosiah 17:5–7), a man he would have let live had it not been for his priests (Mosiah 17:11–12). As secret combinations were competing for power in late Jaredite society, even a political leader’s own high priest assassinated him to gain the throne (Ether 14:9).

Today, traditional religion has become far less influential in numerous nations than science, which for many has become in effect a modern cult somewhat like ancient idolatry, including the auto-idolatrous worship of the Zoramites or the related teachings of Korihor, than true science. True science is not a means of subjecting people or instituting a dogma, but a means of discovery based on questioning and the freedom to challenging existing paradigms. In science, truth is not decreed by an authority figure claiming to “represent science,” but is found by a process of elimination and hypothesis testing in which one’s status is not as important as the data and sound methodology.

Whether it’s dubious science related to such topics as the foods and chemicals we eat, the masking of children and adults, abortion, pandemic lockdowns or mandates of questionable drugs, we may find real science increasingly out of sight as we are asked to cheer for an ever-visible, always-lauded Cult of Science where profit and power may eclipse the light of truth.

Nutrition Science and Its Conflicts of Interest: A “Greasy Combination”?

The phrase “conspiring men” may evoke the deadly secret combinations in the Book of Mormon that gained sole management the Nephite or Jaredite nations and led them to total chaos and destruction. But murderous megalomaniacs taking over a government are not the only “works of darkness” the Book of Mormon warns against. That spectrum can include corrupt officials taking bribes or less shady instances of influential organizations simply receiving generous donations that could give rise to conflicts of interest.

One of the most important historic examples of corporate influence on public health policy has affected most of us for decades. As a young child I remember my mother preferring to buy margarine over butter because it was “healthier” according to the experts. I heard this throughout my life as a trustworthy proclamation of science coming from the respected American Heart Association (AHA), one of the nation’s largest and most influential non-profit organizations. That advice, including warnings against cholesterol in animal fats and against saturated fats in general, was repeated in classrooms, advertisements, news stories, and by government officials ever since the AHA began promoting it in 1961. Instead of animal products, we were told to use “vegetable oils” like cottonseed oil, corn oil, and soybean oil. Whether that advice is wise or dangerous is beyond my knowledge, but there was an important conflict of interest that should have been considered.

The American Heart Association was founded in Chicago in 1924 by six doctors, including Paul Dudley White, who would become the physician of President Dwight Eisenhower. As the AHA was growing in prominence, in the 1950s a professor at the University of Minnesota, Ancel Keys, developed the “diet-heart hypothesis” that proposed heart disease was caused by saturated fats and cholesterol in our diet. He argued that we should be consuming plant oils instead. As Nina Teicholz explains in The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) and in “A Short History of Saturated Fat: The Making and Unmaking of a Scientific Consensus” in Current Opinion on Endocrinology, Diabetes and Obesity 30, no. 1 (Feb. 2023), Keys successfully promoted his theory in spite of relying on just a handful of small, flawed studies.

Keys’s work caught the attention of White, who had gained the nation’s attention in helping President Eisenhower after his heart attack in 1955. White wrote a foreword for Keys’s 1959 work, Eat Well and Stay Well (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959). With White’s endorsement of the “diet-heart” theory, Keys’s fame further expanded. He would be on the cover of Time magazine on Jan. 13, 1961. That year, the AHA formally issued its game-changing recommendation supporting Keys’s hypothesis, laying down recommendations that have moved millions from animal fats to seed-based oils that have not traditionally been a typical part of human diets. It has always been assumed that this decision was simply based on science, but there may be something more to consider.

Though the AHA began as a small organization for doctors, it was dramatically transformed in 1948 by a generous donation from Procter & Gamble, a company that was seeking to expand sales of its Crisco brand shortening, a plant-based substitute for lard made from cottonseed oil (originally). Their $1.7 million gift would be about $22 million today. After receiving this large sum, the AHA changed its business model to become a volunteer-based organization that does fund-raising to provide significant grants for heart-related research. Today they have over 30 million volunteers and significant influence on many aspects of heart health. It is highly respected by media and government, and often works closely with both.

A few years before the AHA was founded, Procter & Gamble was focused on making candles. They found a way to make candles without the need for expensive animal fat (tallow). A chemical treatment of cottonseed oil could make a lard-like material from liquid oil. But cost was not the only challenge for a candle maker. As electric lights were reducing the demand for candles, they looked for new markets for their product and thus turned to food, where lard was an important material in cooking. This led to the 1911 launch of Crisco (coined from Crystallized Cottonseed Oil) shortening, a product that was too often in my diet as a child.

Unfortunately, the chemical process they used to “hydrogenate” the oil to make it more solid at room temperature and less likely to go rancid resulted in a high amount of trans-fats. Trans-fats are now widely understood to be unhealthy and have largely been banned in the U.S. (Today Crisco shortening, now owned by B&G Foods, has been reformulated to have very low trans fats and their Crisco oil should be free of trans fats.) Nevertheless, Keys’s work raised the hope that Crisco shortening was a healthier alternative to animal fats (even though it was still partially saturated).

Just as Procter & Gamble had given a transformative boost to the AHA thirteen years earlier, the AHA then gave a massive boost to Procter & Gamble’s rising product. This helped the company to grow and expand into many other consumer product fields.

I don’t know how much Procter & Gamble’s prior funding of the AHA influenced their 1961 dietary recommendations. I also don’t know how much more Procter & Gamble did for the AHA after 1948. Large companies that make a big donation to a non-profit tend to stay supportive and close, and often have specific motivations for the donation. In any case, there was a conflict of interest in 1961 that we should have known about.

The relationship between the company and the non-profit may have been free of scheming.. Perhaps it’s best to characterize this conflicted relationship not as a secret combination but a seemingly benign “greasy combination.”

In spite of the poor evidence behind the recommendations, the AHA’s stance has remained solidly planted in the veins of public health discourse, leading millions to prefer oils over animal fats, skim milk over whole, and snacks that achieve decreased fat by raising sugar content, all based on opinions passed down a long chain of authority figures that lack real scientific support. 

Opportunities for unscientific dietary science may go beyond plant oils. Now Unilever, another large multinational company with food and beverage bands such as Lipton Tea, according to a Dec. 2020 press release, is partnering with the AHA to promote a heart-healthy lifestyle that includes drinking plenty of Lipton Tea. Nice!

Conflict of interest and questionable science may permeate many aspects of the world of food and beverage. In light of the declining health of many Americans, it should be clear that something isn’t going right. Curves of declining heart attack deaths look reassuring, but these gains may be partly due to improved rapid response, emergency care, drugs, and surgery. But is our cardiovascular heath really improving? How are we doing on diabetes and other illnesses clearly related to diet? Are the chemicals in our diets really safe? It’s time to reconsider our ways and more fully contemplate the wise principles in the Word of Wisdom and the dangers of trusting people with a profit motive to sell us their products, whether they are addictive or not.

Perhaps a key principle we can derive from the Word of Wisdom’s warnings is the need to ask questions and seek knowledge.

The Government’s Response to the Great Barrington Declaration: Real Science vs. the Cult of Science

At a critical moment in American history, as a nation in fear was being asked to continue sacrificing many liberties as lockdowns were being imposed across the country. These would shut down many parts of the economy, our schools, organized religion, etc., and adversely affect the health of children in many ways (increased obesity from lack of activity, severe mental health issues, developmental problems, etc.). We were told that this is what “the science” demanded and almost no journalists dared ask questions about this.

At that time, three of the greatest experts in public health and epidemiology spoke out and reminded of key best practices based upon science and sound policy. These were Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford Univ.), Dr. Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard). They came together at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts to discuss the crisis, and spontaneously decided to draft a declaration to the scientific community, political leaders, and the world warning that the policies being pursued would come at great costs and make things worse. What became the “Great Barrington Declaration” was written from October 2 to 4, 2020, then released to the public on October 5. The declaration has now been signed by nearly 1 million people and a great number of scientists. It directly challenged what politicians had been calling “the science” as they ramped up their power and trampled on ours.

Whose science was right? What does one do when two groups of scientists have strongly different theories? The scientific method is clear: explore data and the analysis; test the theories; if things are murky, design new experiments and get more data. This was time for a classic scientific debate based on logic and evidence. Instead, the leaders of the U.S. public health apparatus got together and literally conspired to use the popular media to “take down” their political enemies, those scientists who dared challenge their power. Here is what the head of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, wrote to Anthony Fauci on Oct. 8, three days after the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) was posted:

This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. Is it underway?

That email and others were obtained through a FOIA request by the American Institute for Economic Research. Those emails showed that Collins and Fauci managed a propaganda campaign against the GBD. Popular media organizations conducted what was essentially a smear campaign to silence the once-widely respected “fringe epidemiologists.” For example, Collins went to the Washington Post. They responded with an Oct. 14 article whose headline declared that the  Great Barrington Declaration gained Trump’s approval “but appalls top scientists.” Collins was quoted:

This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment.

We know from the “Twitter Files” and other documents that government figures pressured social media to silence these independent thinkers. Even finding the GDB on Google or finding discussion of it on other platform became difficult. The media was on board. The critics were shunned and silenced and America and many other nations continued marching down the path of draconian lockdowns, following the example of China, though not as harsh. Millions would lose their jobs and more would be denied education, healthy activity, and family visits. Economies would be crushed, supply chains destroyed, and freedom suppressed, including freedom of religion.

The elderly would die alone without family at their side. When my 88-year-old mother with severe dementia broke her leg and was rushed to a large hospital in Salt Lake City, the hospital staff refused to let anyone from her family accompany her. She was dragged away from them, screaming in fear without loved-ones present, in great pain and having no idea what was going on. After getting guidance from a relative who was a physician familiar with that hospital, it took me two hours of making calls and working through an ugly system to finally get a top administrator to agree that their own rules allowed for some accommodation given her severe emotional distress and psychological needs. Thanks to unlocking a touch of humanity, I was allowed to come to the hospital and stay with her, but absolutely no more than one visitor at a time was allowed because of “science.” It was eerie being in that hospital that seemed so empty. I felt as if I were the only visitor there when so much lonely suffering must have been underway. Humanity and common sense had taken a setback.

The lockdowns were a global disaster. Sweden, Tanzania, and other countries that ignored the sacrifices demanded by the Cult of Science did well, as the GBD declared. The most severe, most heavily enforced lockdowns of all in China only delayed the infection that almost everyone got and had made everything much worse, exactly as the Great Barrington Declaration predicted. In my opinion, the censorship that kept a vital debate from taking place was a crime against humanity and one of the ugliest “works of darkness” in modern history. But it was a great time for would-be tyrants who reveled in their power. Now a good deal of scientific research confirms what a failure they were. One early example is Ari R. Joffe, “Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink,” Frontiers in Public Health (Feb. 26, 2021). For a broad overview of a large body of literature, see the press release for 220-page downloadable book, Did Lockdowns Work? The verdict on Covid restrictions by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung & Steve H. Hanke, published July 2023 by the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs. (The book is an updated version of a 2022 report from by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.) This comprehensive meta-study on the impact of the lockdowns demands attention. One of the authors, Dr. Lars Jonung summarizes their findings: “It demonstrates that lockdowns were a failed promise. They had negligible health effects but disastrous economic, social and political costs to society. Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times” (emphasis added).

Whatever the consequences of the lockdowns, they were not based on real science. Rather, they were an expression of the Cult of Science justifying massive power grabs. Much of the world marched in lockstep with unscientific demands of a combination of public health officials in the U.S., the U.K., the World Health Organization, and many other accomplices. Those who questioned were shut down.

The Theater Behind the Mandates: A Reliable Admission from an Insider

Censorship was applied not just against opposition to the lockdowns. When the vaccines came out, anybody who challenged their efficacy was likely to face consequences: shadow banning (making your post or website relatively less visible to others), account closure, fact check warnings, discipline for medical staff, being shunned or fired, etc. But there would be reason enough already to doubt them in a scientific publication for which Fauci was a coauthor. In early 2023, a scientific paper co-authored by Fauci himself explained why it was unreasonable all along to expect the COVID vaccines to be effective. For example, the immune system of the lungs (the mucosal immune system) is largely distinct from the systemic immune system we have in our blood. So the injections we receive into our arms, which then migrate into the systemic immune system, is not likely to successfully alter the immune system in the lungs. This is why typical mucosal respiratory viruses have never been well controlled with vaccines. Such arguments could have been swiftly taken down if they had been made by others, especially when the narrative of success had not yet exploded. But this basic medical fact was quietly noted in a Fauci-approved publication for his fellow scientists to explain the failure as just an opportunity for the next generation of vaccine development. No apologies were made to the thousands who lost their jobs or other rights for refusing the vaccines, or to those who, after being pressured to received them, were injured. See David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger, and Anthony S. Fauci, Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses, Cell Host & Microbe 31, no. 11 (Jan. 11, 2023): 146–157, where we find this admission:

Taking all of these factors into account, it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines. This observation raises a question of fundamental importance: if natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so? This is a major challenge for future vaccine development, and overcoming it is critical as we work to develop “next-generation” vaccines….

Natural infections with mucosal respiratory viruses may not be fully controlled by human immune responses because the human immune system has evolved to tolerate them during very short intervals of mucosal viral replication…. [emphasis added]

All the pressure to force the vaccines on people and the urging of punishment and hate the Proprietor be heaped about those ignoramuses who refused the experimental medication was not for our good, and those grand priests and princes of science who pushed for these draconian policies surely knew it. It was theatre not to help us, but to club us into submission and to maximize profits or power for those behind their thrones and pulpits.

The COVID Genesis Story: Canonizing the Cult’s Sacred Writ

When COVID broke out in Wuhan, China, and began spreading across the world, knowledge of its origins became an important issue for scientists to understand this virus and related threats. Two main theories competed: (1) the “lab leak” theory of an accidental leak from a virology lab in Wuhan, the most famous biolab on earth that was working with experimental corona viruses, including apparent gain-of-function organisms deliberately made more infectious; and (2) the “natural origins” or “spillover” theory that the novel virus developed naturally through interactions between organisms in bats and other animals before jumping to humans.

Almost as soon as the lab leak theory was proposed, it was attacked by two groups with conflicts of interest. Both appear to have conspired to advance a desired narrative. Both published a paper in a leading scientific journal aimed at shutting down the lab leak theory.

Group 1: Scientists organized by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance

The first group comprised twenty-seven prominent scientists who wrote an impassioned letter calling the proposal of a lab leak a “conspiracy theory” while standing up for the great work being done by colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Their letter, “Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19,” was published on March 7, 2020 in a premier journal, The Lancet. What the authors and the editors failed to note was the easily determined existence of at least one serious conflict of interest: co-author Peter Daszak was President of the EcoHealth Alliance, the organization funneling U.S. taxpayer money from NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to support the apparent gain of function research that might have been the cause of the pandemic if the lab leak theory was true (a dangerous type of research that had been banned by Congress). While the EcoHealth Alliance was only mentioned once in the information for the authors, several other authors also had significant undisclosed connections to that organization.

If your company might have been partly responsible for one of the worst public health disasters in decades, you would have a tremendous personal incentive, contrary to the public interest, to cover up your involvement. Such a conflict is vital information but was hidden.

That paper was used to “fact check” those on Facebook or other platforms who discussed the lab leak theory. It was treated by the media as solid evidence against the “conspiracy theory,” even though it provided no evidence or even cited scientific publications. It was just pure assertion by authority figures, tossing out the fearful pejorative “conspiracy theory.” However, the lab leak is the opposite of a conspiracy, as Nicholas Wade cogently explains, for it entails an accidental release due to sloppiness, not a deliberate act by China to start a global pandemic by killing its own citizens first. It’s only the coverups and lies used to fight this theory that have justified thinking about some kind of conspiracy, or corrupt secret combination.

Such coverups and red flags begin with the drafting of the Lancet paper itself, as we later learned from emails obtained by the nonprofit public health research group, U.S. Right to Know (usrtk.org). In their post by Sainath Suryanarayanan, “EcoHealth Alliance orchestrated key scientists’ statement on ‘natural origin’ of SARS-CoV-2,” Nov. 18, 2020, several bombshells point to corruption and cover-up: 

Emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know show that a statement in The Lancet authored by 27 prominent public health scientists condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The emails obtained via public records requests show that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet statement, and that he intended it to “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”. Daszak wrote that he wanted “to avoid the appearance of a political statement”.

The short Lancet letter perhaps was not enough cover for Daszak, for he later chose to join a WHO team that went to China with the assistance of the Chinese government in Jan. 2021 to “investigate” the origins of the virus. Not surprisingly, the inspectors saw nothing suspicious and concluded after a short visit that the genesis of the virus was likely natural, again without plausible evidence such as finding of animals contaminated with the virus. A lab leak as the source was said to be “extremely unlikely.” No attention was called to the massive destruction of evidence by China, including destroying physical evidence and deleting a database and web pages related to their virus research.

The trip to Wuhan was viewed by some critics as mere theatre by the WHO to help China cover its tracks. WHO also had a conflict of interest arising in part from China being a large donor supporting the WHO, along with Bill Gates and the United States. But China was not the only beneficiary of that shoddy investigation. It also further helped the EcoHealth Alliance and thus the NIH and the United States government better hide their connection to a potential origin of the pandemic. Daszak’s connection to the funding of risky research in Wuhan and his glaring conflict of interest were not mentioned in media coverage. After the show of high-ranking officials “investigating” in Wuhan was completed, the second more thorough stage of the planned investigation was quietly cancelled. Apparently, the real mission had already been accomplished.

Group 2: NIH Leaders and Other Scientists

The cover-up began, as we now know from emails and other documents obtained through FOIA requests, that Fauci and Collins worked hard behind the scenes to stop debate not just on the lockdowns but also on the origins of COVID. The documents show that multiple scientists in the top echelons of public health circles thought the lab leak was the likely origin, but were pushed to publish a paper to support the narrative Collins and Fauci needed. Three helpful reports on this matter are:

1. Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse, Michael Shellenberger, and Matt Taibbi “Top Scientists Misled Congress About Covid Origins, Newly Released Emails And Messages Show,” Public, July 18, 2023. (Note that the latter two authors, Shellenberger and Taibbi, were among the stars of the Twitter Files exposé that revealed government-driven censorship on Twitter before Elon Musk acquired it.) This report shows that the authors of “Proximal Origins” were “not simply following the data, but actively sought to discredit the lab leak, conceal information, deceive journalists, and mislead the public.” Wow.
2. Matt Taibbi, “’In Their Labs’: Fifteen Illuminating Passages in The Proximal Origin Chats and Emails,” Racket News, July 18, 2023. This shows some of the emails obtained indicating that their authors of “Proximal Origins” didn’t really believe in their paper, were preparing it for review of the authorities over them, were aware of pressure from “intel” (CIA?) on this project, etc. This was all quite inconsistent with real science but just the thing to please the priests and pontiffs of a Cult of Science in need of a coverup.
3. Nicholas Wade, “A Covid Origin Conspiracy?,” City Journal, 23, 2022. A notable science writer explores some of the gems in disclosed emails on the coverup of COVID origins.

After a paper from Indian researchers on Jan. 31, 2020 identified multiple factors in the genome pointing to lab origins, Fauci organized an emergency meeting to discuss origins. One of these scientists who had contacted Fauci about the likelihood of lab origins, Danish scientist Kristian G. Andersen, was part of the call. Fauci, who controls enormous influence over R&D funding that is essential for researchers in the life sciences, urged them to counter the lab leak theory. They agreed, but their communications before and after their paper was written shows their paper was not really reflecting their views. One of the doubting authors was Robert F. Garry, a virologist and a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine. Nicholas Wade writing in the New York Post comments on one of Garry’s emails to the “cabal” of fellow authors:

[Garry] remarks in the latest emails on the fact that the inserted furin cleavage site, a string of 12 units of RNA, the virus’ genetic material, was exactly the required length, a precision unusual in nature: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature … it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”

The Indian paper soon met with strong opposition and was quickly retracted while the team of scientists who had privately expressed various levels of agreement with the lab leak theory suddenly wrote and published a famous paper declaring that the lab leak theory was nonsense: Kristian G. Andersen et al., “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” was published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. Intended to end debate on the origins of the pandemic, this paper has been cited almost 6,000 times in other scientific papers and has been viewed millions of times. The editor of the journal, Joao Monteiro, tweeted that this was “great work” that puts to rest “conspiracy theories” about COVID origins. The paper was publicly promoted by the WHO and by Fauci. In my view, it gives a cursory dismissal to the lab leak, makes arguments without new evidence, tries to justify natural origins based on speculation, and neglects the significance of the furin cleavage sites (see Nicholas Wade’s discussion).

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, Director of the CDC when COVID broke out, shared his experiences involving the politics of COVID origin theories in a 2024 documentary, Thank You, Dr. Fauci (payment required; see interviews at 07:05–14:35). He was skeptical of the official narrative in late December 2019 that the virus originated from a wet market. Soon he heard from Dr. George Gao, Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who told him that the infection had nothing to do with the wet market narrative—apparently numerous people with no connection to the wet market were being infected. Redfield said he knew in the early days of Jan. 2020 that the wet market story “was a ruse” (09:40–10:00). Redfield’s suspicions of a lab leak would grow in light of (1) the genetic sequence of the virus with its furin cleavage site on the spike protein to make the virus stick to human cells, a feature not known in any related viruses; (2) the lack of animal evidence supporting natural origins; and (3) the abnormal speed at which a new virus became able to effectively infect humans. He told Fauci that this looked like a leak of a virus developed in a lab. He was surprised at Fauci’s adamant opposition to that theory and refusal to pursue scientific investigation to test the hypothesis (10:30–11:30). Why wouldn’t he be interested in the possibility of a virus engineered by gain of function research, something that had long fascinated Fauci (11:00–11:30)?

A breakthrough for Redfield came when he saw the published papers from work at the Wuhan lab, including V. Menachery, et al., “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” Nature Medicine 21 (2015): 1508–1513. These showed gain-of-function research directly relevant to the COVID virus being conducted in Wuhan—with an acknowledgement of funding from numerous grants provided through the NIH and the EcoHealth Alliance. Redfield began to make troubling connections. Fauci, however, remained adamant and managed to take the leadership of the U.S effort against the pandemic (14:00–14:30). Redfield had to step down on Jan. 20 as the Biden Administration came to power. Fauci then marshalled the scientists who wrote the “Proximal Origins” paper.

Widely praised as the definitive answer to COVID origins, many can now see that “Proximal Origins” was wrong on many counts, as Jeff M. Smith explains in “The Lie of the Century: The Origin of COVID-19,” Heritage Foundation, May 2, 2024:

How could this group of elite scientists have gotten this paramount question so horribly wrong?

The inevitable answer is: they didn’t. They weren’t wrong. They were lying.

We know from leaked internal communications that some of the same scientists most ardently dismissing the lab-leak theory took one look at SARSCOV2 and concluded it was, in the words of biologist Kristian Andersen, “so friggin’ likely” the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab “because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

The virus seemed “pre-adapted from the get go,” observed virologist Edward Holmes. The presence of an unprecedented Furin Cleavage Site in SARSCOV2 kept scientist Bob Garry “up all night.” The SARSCOV2 genome was “inconsistent with evolutionary theory,” concluded Dr. Andersen on January 31, 2020.

One day later, some of the same scientists held a phone call with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci and rapidly did an about-face, condemning the lab-leak theory as a “crackpot” conspiracy and viciously attacking anyone questioning their fabricated consensus. A larger network of scientists and science journalists quickly fell in line. The coverup had begun.

This scandal involved many efforts to obfuscate and hide actions.

Impact of the Coverup

After the two widely publicized letters from two related groups, were published, anyone who suggested that COVID perhaps began as a lab leak was likely to be censored and labeled a “conspiracy theorist” for the first three years of the pandemic. One example is the website Zerohedge.com which was one of the first alternative news sites to be demonetized and shut down on multiple platforms for raising the possibility of a lab leak based by sharing portions of once-public information from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They were years ahead of mainstream media on reporting about Wuhan. Another example comes from Facebook, where Mark Zuckerberg, far from a “conspiracy theorist,” recently admitted that they were pressured by the U.S. government to censor unapproved theories on the origins of COVID. Pressured by whom? Not Fauci or his staff, but the White House itself. Why were they involved? I’d like to know.

However, now the evidence for the lab leak has become accepted enough that it has gradually become a mainstream view, but with little fanfare. Even the New York Times published a compelling column from a noted scientist at MIT and Harvard declaring that the virus likely was leaked from that Chinese lab. See Alina Chan’s opinion column, “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points,” New York Times, June 3, 2024. (This is the same New York Times that denounced a senator in 2020 for supporting the lab leak “conspiracy theory” and “fringe theory.”) Chan’s essay provides compelling evidence pointing to suspicious behavior and coverup activity consistent with a lab leak, and evidence regarding the nature of the virus consistent with origins in the lab in Wuhan. It has become fairly obvious now, in my opinion. But until recently, the coverup was strong and very few “journalists,” doctors, scientists, politicians and influencers dared to ask questions about the implausible origins story concocted by our public health officials.

Now that it’s OK to discuss the lab leak, isn’t the problem solved? One little detail about COVID origins was covered-up for a couple years or so. Not ideal, but was this such a bad thing? Was anything at stake besides two embarrassed NIH officials and a CEO partner (another public-private partnership) losing face?

While saving face, saving power, preserving the ability to control billions in funding (for the NIH) or many millions for EcoHealth Alliance may have been motivations for the coverups, we should also remember that the dangerous manipulation of pathogens to make them more dangerous, gain of function research, was contrary to a 2014 moratorium that was still in place when apparent gain of function research was being funded by the NIH and EcoHealth alliance. If research contrary to law contributed to the global pandemic, there is the potential for criminal and civil lawsuits with greater repercussions than losing face or control of research grants. The harm done by the possibly improper or illegal funding may have contributed to many deaths and almost incalculable losses. Watch for a Presidential pardon to “resolve” the issue, but let’s keep demanding answers. 

The many efforts to hide actions in the lab leak coverup point to something foul demanding investigation, a point made by Vinay Prasad, a lifelong liberal Democrat and respected a professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, in his post, “Fauci actively hid his communications from the public on Lab Leak,” Vinay Prasad’s Observations and Thoughts, May 23, 2024. Without investigation and transparency, it’s hard to know just how much harm has been done, but even a small dose of the venom of corruption can cause deep wounds, especially when largely untreated.

In sum, the coverup of the lab leak matters greatly. A coverup on the origins of what may have been the greatest global public health crisis in the past century has the potential to exacerbate our risk and keep those who may have caused in power to try again in some other form. It weakens the ability of science to focus on the correct issues and encourages bad actors to keep acting badly. It’s no small matter, even if at key junctures, those involved felt they were just doing their job.

In an excellent essay looking at the betrayal of scientists who misled the world about the origins of COVID, Ian Birrell choose a strongly worded but accurate title: “The secret messages behind the lab-leak cover-up: Beijing was helped by a cabal of conspiring scientists,” Unherd, July 28, 2023, which reviews further details of this case. Birrell’s closing words provide one perspective to consider:

We still do not know for sure the origins of that destructive pandemic. But we do know it was an extraordinary coincidence that Covid emerged in the Chinese city containing the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia, a place with known safety concerns conducting high-risk research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. We know China covered up the outbreak, hid key data, lied to other countries and refused to allow proper investigation. And we know that accidents and human error can occur during research. So as Andersen said to his pals, the possibility of some kind of lab incident was “friggin’ likely”.

It looks beyond doubt that Beijing’s cover-up was aided by an outrageous attempt to suppress global debate, led by the Western scientists we should have been able to trust to search for the truth and guide an unshackled debate based on hard facts. They were assisted by patsy politicians, supine journalists and complicit scientific publications. This murky affair appears to be the most terrible betrayal of science — and indeed of democracy — that was far darker and more disturbing than those sinister events that felled Oppenheimer seven decades ago.

Such betrayal reminds us that the Cult of Science, rich with funding and opportunities for fame, is truly “science falsely so called.” It does not deserve our adulation, worship, or respect. To protect our health, we need to understand the contrast to real science and recognize the warning signs of the Cult and its occasional “conspiring men” seeking to deceive us. Even if those involved are all preemptively pardoned, we need investigation to expose the layers of crime and corruption that may still threaten us.

Light is the solution for opposing works of darkness; exposure is often the cure for secret combinations. The censorship we have seen over many aspects of the pandemic should motivate us to keep investigating.

Good News: A Victory Against Health-related Censorship

After the depressing news about scientific scandals, I am happy to report two related breakthroughs for those who oppose censorship and corruption in the fields of science and health. One breakthrough was the successful lawsuit of Aaron Siri against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that forced the release of 450,000 pages of internal documents from Pfizer, Inc. pertaining to their testing of safety and efficacy for what may be the most profitable medication ever over a short time period, the COVID vaccines. Now doctors, researchers, and citizens like me can peak behind the curtain and view the wizardry behind the world’s most powerful P.R. campaigns, one that launched a remarkably profitable product across the globe after far less safety testing than normally required. Was it as safe and effective as advertised?

To better answer such questions ourselves, we can benefit from a second breakthrough. This was a massive project involving many weeks of work from over 3,000 experts extracting data from the voluminous Pfizer documents. The project was guided by Naomi Wolf, a famous liberal feminist with a passion for freedom and the protection of human heath, including, of course, women’s health. I mention her political leanings only because many people instantly assume that if someone is not positive about the safety of the COVID vaccines, they must be a far-right extremist of some kind, and thus a very bad person whose ideas must be ignored. But whatever your political leanings, there is no justification in ignoring this courageous and intelligent woman.

What she has accomplished is the distillation of vast amounts of data into a concise, readable, but technically rich volume of 400 pages. This is the scientific information that we can use to have intelligent discussions about the Pfizer vaccines and especially about the dangers inherent in our systems for drug approval and drug promotion, where Doctrine and Covenants 89:4 seems keenly relevant. I urge you to read a few chapters in Naomi Wolf, with Amy Kelly, The Pfizer Papers (New York: War Room Books and Skyhorse Publishing, 2024). For starters, see the powerful Introduction by Naomi Wolf that you can read for free on Amazon (click on “Read sample” and scroll down).

What we learn from The Pfizer Papers is troubling, especially for those of us who were vaccinated and trusted what the experts told us, trusted the FDA to carefully examine safety and efficacy data, trusted the good will of Big Pharma, and naively believed nothing as corrupt as we see in Pfizer’s documents could happen in this country. My trust has been misplaced.

The first question you should be asking right now is why it took a lawsuit that went all the way to the Federal Circuit Court to get Pfizer’s safety data released. This was data that they had to submit to the FDA for review. Should not that be available to the public? The FDA—supposedly an agency accountable to the American people, but one that receives a significant part of its funding from Big Pharma and has employees who benefit from the revolving door between government and the companies they regulate—refused to provide documents under a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). Pfizer actually asked the judge to seal the papers for 75 years. Why would a government agency wish to help a corporation hide what should be public information? Hint: read the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine & Covenants, especially the Word of Wisdom.

Aaron Siri explains that while the FDA garnered public support for the experimental vaccines by promising full transparency, but then resisted when asked to be transparent and share the documents. When the judge pushed back against their 75-year request, they offered to release 500 pages a month, which would take 55 years. With only 18,000 employees, I suppose they just didn’t have the manpower to process (i.e., copy and hand over) the information any faster. Consider the FDA’s claim in light of how long the FDA took to not just make copies but to carefully digest the information:

The FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine on Aug. 23, 2021, just 108 days after Pfizer started producing the records to the agency. During that period, the FDA asserts it conducted an intense, robust, and thorough analysis of those documents to assure the public that the Pfizer vaccine was safe and effective.

So Pfizer claims they would need over 20,000 days to make the records available to the public, but were able to thoroughly analyze them in 108 days? This kind of easily detected dishonesty might make us skeptical of anything this agency does, or any agency where there is the potential for corrupt alliances or “public-private partnerships” that go against public interests. We can also wonder if they lied about the “careful analysis” they did of 450,000 pages in 108 days.

I won’t get into the complex heath issues and inadequate testing here. Look at Pfizer’s data.

There’s still much we don’t know about the motives for the coverups and the strange actions that occurred throughout the pandemic, but we can see the corrupt smoke of conspiratorial fires blazing behind some scenes. Censorship, lies, coverups, power grabs, billions in profits as people are forced to take a drug that doesn’t work—so little of what was called “following the Science” involved real science at all. Instead, we see propaganda, censorship, conflicts of interest, power grabs, seeking for gain – classic symptoms of secret combinations as taught by the Book of Mormon, though so many details remain under the cloak of darkness, waiting for more actual journalists and investigators to reveal the truth.

More Than Money and Politics: Tragic Physical Harm

While writing this article, my wife and I visited a family of African friends we hadn’t seen for a while. We found they were morning the loss of the cousin who had just been buried a few days earlier. He was an active, healthy, normal young boy, just six years old. He had started coughing, then had a stomachache but went to school anyway. And then later that day he collapsed and died of a heart attack. So tragic. Six-year-olds don’t get heart attacks. What happened?

As we shared in their grief, a terrible thought hit me. I thought of the many healthy athletes who have suddenly collapsed or even died in the past couple of years, of the covered-up or downplayed stories of myocarditis in males, especially young males, possibly associated with a profitable medication. With trepidation, I gently asked a terrible question: “Had he received the COVID vaccine?” The question seemed unnecessary, though, because African immigrants are among the most COVID-vaccine hesitant people on earth (and for some reason, Africa has had some of the lowest excess death mortality numbers in the past few years and some of the lowest COVID deaths). I could not imagine an immigrant from eastern Africa taking their kids in to get a COVID shot, but still, the death was so unusual that I had to at least ask.

Then came the answer: They weren’t sure. All they knew was that the boy and his family had just recently come to the U.S., and that the legal entry process required the boy to get a lot of vaccine shots. Numerous vaccines were given, and part of the CDC’s current policy is the truly unscientific recommendation that children over 6 months in age get vaccinated for COVID. So yes, he had surely received his Pfizer shots and many more, a combination that may have no serious safety studies to back it up.

I wondered if the doctors had assured them that the vaccine shots were totally safe and could not possibly have been the cause of death. But they went beyond that, not even mentioning the possible impact of so many vaccines shortly before. Instead, they wondered if a bacterial infection had struck his heart and so did tests to see if that was a potential cause. No, no infection. All they could tell the family is that they had no idea what might have caused it. (That reminded me of the scientist I heard recently saying that we have no idea what is causing autism, but it’s definitely not vaccines. His faith in the the Cult is impressive.) And if vaccines were not even raised as a remote possibility, I am confident that they did not report this death to the VAERS system or any other database related to vaccine injuries, just as two doctors saw no reason to report a possible vaccine injury I had after receiving my Pfizer shots. Even raising questions about vaccine safety can get you treated as a pathetic “anti-vaxxer,” the ultimate pejorative and potential relationship breaker in that industry. But don’t blame the doctors. It’s a cultural thing that might take a new generation of professionals to repair if they can be freed of widespread censorship of painful data. Or perhaps there could be progress if they would dare to study things out themselves by reading The Pfizer Papers or a remarkable collection of essays from a wide spectrum of authors on the harms of vax-related censorship and coverups in C.H. Klotz, ed., Canary in a COVID World: How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World (Ottawa: Canary House Publishing, 2023).

I have had respect for medical professional all my life, but I have also seen that they get essentially zero training on one of the most important aspects of heath, nutrition. They also are conditioned to follow orders, to respect medical authority figures, to not rock the boat, and basically just do their jobs. Which is why, if you ask a doctor friend of yours if they had any concerns about getting their children vaccinated in light of recent data and studies, they might say that it’s not their job to sort through studies, and that they trust the medical authorities above them. This is the mindset their training and professional culture brings – we must not blame them for that. Each of us have assumptions we accept based on our culture and training that may really need to be reconsidered.

I am outraged that we treat legal immigrants, refugees fleeing the dangers of war and armed gangs, far worse than we treat those who walk across our border illegally. Here highly unscientific CDC recommendations that completely ignore the science showing almost zero risk from COVID for kids may have created another casualty to ignore. This is not just about the ugly corruption of a “public-private partnership” between U.S. officials and a powerful company that brings profits and rewards to the conspiring men and women involved. It’s a literal matter of life and death that can bring death or severe injuries to many.

Something terrible is happening to our children. It’s time to investigate in detail rather than to deny and coverup. The Word of Wisdom should at least give us the lens to be skeptical, to recognize that there are conspiring men out there selling products that might not be as safe and effective as they claim.

As the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) points out:

In 1986, 12.8% of children in the U.S. had a chronic health condition compared to 54% in 2007 — curiously, the last year this data was made publicly available.

Why is data on chronic illness in children not getting more attention? And why are we so afraid to look at possible causes of autism? Consider this chart, also provided by the CHD:

Why is there not a flurry of scientific activity to track down the potential causes of autism? Decades ago, autism was extremely rare. Now there are many families in my social circles with autistic children (though I have not seen it among the many African immigrant friends we have in our community).

I don’t know what factors are the problem behind autism or other disorders that are rising among children in the U.S., but something is wrong. Some suspect that autism may have a link to the injections young children are required to receive here. I don’t know. But it should be a fair topic for further research. One can also wonder how many of our childhood afflictions are worsened by the belief that a bowl full of sugar-laden loops bright with chemical dies is an essential part of a complete breakfast? Is there harm from all the artificial colors and other chemicals in our food? Are there unexpected interactions between diet, environment, and compulsory medications? Again, I don’t know, but I think we need to find out how to help our kids be healthier. I think we need to question more and not simply trust authority figures who say that diet or other factors cannot possibly be the cause.

A Crisis in Trust

Recently, while wondering about red biofilm that had begun to form in my ultrasonic humidifier, I learned that the red matter was likely a pigment from a strain of bacteria known as Serratia maracescens. I now regularly clean the humidifier and applying hydrogen peroxide for a while to prevent Serratia biofilm formation. It’s a pathogen, but usually not very dangerous, a valuable finding kindly obtained by the U.S. government. But do you know how they learned this? I didn’t until I read a 2011 report on Serratia infections by Steven D. Mahlen in Clinical Microbiology Reviews. I was shocked to read this:

In a now-famous exposé, the U.S. government released S. marcescens over both civilian population centers and military training areas from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s in the hopes of gathering data on the potential spread of bioterrorism agents used against the United States. These experiments were unearthed by investigative journalism in the mid-1970s, prompting a congressional investigation that studied U.S. government testing on the public. In the meantime, S. marcescens was revealed to be a pathogen capable of causing a full spectrum of clinical disease, from urinary tract infections (UTIs) to pneumonia….

[There] were test that the U.S. government had conducted on the population of San Francisco in 1950 and also in the New York City subway system to determine how vulnerable these cities were to a biological warfare weapon attack and also to determine the viability of organisms used in these tests…. On 23 December 1976, the Atlanta Constitution reported eight locations where tests were run, with dates: the Pentagon, Washington, DC (1950); San Francisco (1950); Mechanicsburg, PA (1951); Key West, FL (1952); Fort McClellan, AL (1952); Panama City, FL (1953); Point Mugu-Port Hueneme, CA (1956); and New York City (1966).

The hearings, which took place on 8 March 1977 and 23 May 1977, revealed that S. marcescens had been tested at “public domain” sites, i.e., civilian population areas, a total of at least 7 times, from 18 August 1949, in Washington, DC, until March 1968, in Hawaii. In addition, S. marcescens was tested against non-public-domain sites (government and military facilities) at least 29 times, ranging from December 1950, at Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, VA, to 16 October 1968, at Edwards Air Force Base, CA. Other agents, such as B. globigii and A. fumigatus, were used in many of the same tests and also in other tests on other sites….

The tests in September 1950 were accomplished by U.S. Navy ships releasing aerosols containing S. marcescens and B. globigii off the coast of San Francisco; winds then carried the organisms inland.

I wasn’t taught about any of this in school. I’m embarrassed not to have known about this disaster. Large-scale testing was done by spreading a pathogen into the air systems of a crowded subway (back when people thought subways were safe!), into the air off the coast of densely populated areas, into buildings and other settings, without warning and without informed consent. How insane and criminal! Only a few deaths were formally recognized. The bacteria is not very harmful for people with a healthy immune system, but how many unnoticed deaths occurred among the sick or elderly that were never reported as related to Serratia?

A government infecting its own people is an almost unimaginable kind of crime to commit—almost a form of germ warfare committed not by some violent cult or gang of terrorists, but by the very people charged with protecting us. It’s hard to think of what could be more outrageous—except perhaps doing the safety testing of a new experimental drug by mandating that millions receive it without informed consent and then tracking the adverse events to see how well it worked or how dangerous it is, using humans as guinea pigs, and then trying to hide the terrible safety data that emerges.

The Serratia work went on for many years before it was exposed by good journalism, just as the horrific Tuskegee Experiment on hundreds of black men kept going for four decades by a corrupted Public Health Service (including the support of the CDC when it split off from the PHS) with the assistance of hundreds of doctors and other medical professionals who went along “for the greater good” and because there were “just doing their job.” In both cases, those charged with protecting us secretly were doing things they knew were harmful. So please explain to me why we must trust our government and our public health officials? By the way, the CDC website mentions the tragedy of the Tuskegee Experiment, but does let readers know about their role. Instead, it touts the “CDC’s on-going role in addressing health equity.”

Jimmy Carter, who just passed away, told us in 1979 that the great crisis America faces is a lack of confidence, including a lack of trust in government. Others invoke that message today, as if the key to preserving democracy is to always trust the government, at least when their party is in charge. But our Founding Fathers were not so gullible. They gave us a system rooted in profound distrust of men, worried that corruption was always a threat that demanded checks and balances and absolute limits on what any man, department, or branch of government could do.

With the expansion of central government and the removal of so many restraints, the basis for blind trust in government is weaker than ever. Democracy requires alert citizens aware of the dangers that corrupt and corruptible men may pose. By the same token, when it comes to our health, we need to be more vigilant than ever.

Vigilance, like science itself, is grounded in the need to ask questions and to pursue reasonable doubts. Questions we need to consider and ask to various parties, politely but firmly, might include:

• What’s in our food? What’s in our medicines? How do we know these ingredients are safe?
• Who paid for or influenced the dietary guidelines you are giving us?
• What conflicts of interest do our officials have?
• Why are we being forced to take this unproven medication?
• Why are you telling us to trust a study paid for by the company whose product it supports or touted by officials with financial interests in the company it helps?
• When regulators are often former employees of the companies they regulate or get plush jobs with the companies they regulate, could that be a conflict of interest?
• Why have you stopped reporting data on adverse effects or other harms of major drugs?
• Why are trying so hard to hide important data from the public?
• Why are so trying so hard to censor “misinformation,” when so much of the misinformation proves to be the things you tell us?
• What’s causing the increase in so many illnesses?
• What is the scientific basis for injecting many dozens of mixtures into my child?
• What is the evidence that your treatments and medications lead to healthier outcomes?
• What science changed when you changed your recommendations from don’t wear masks, to wear a mask, and then wear two masks?
• When you told us that social distancing requirements were based on science, but then later admitted there was no such science, that the rules “just appeared,” what part of “follow the science” was that?
• When you responded to the Great Barrington Declaration by censoring and smearing the famous scientists who wrote that, and demanded censorship of those who shared it, how scientific was that?
• How do you know that spraying glyphosate on oats and wheat shortly before harvesting is safe? (I hope it is, but this is a sincere question I have.)
• Why did you vote to make it impossible to sue companies that hurt us with drugs they knew were unsafe?
• Why should we ever trust you agencies and leaders until you prove yourself to be trustworthy, honest, and transparent?
• What are you blowing into that airduct? Is this another government experiment?

Some of these may be very important questions to ask for your health. Some might be tools to help an errant leader see things differently and change. Some might get you in trouble. Be cautious, loving, and follow the Spirit. Recall, though, how Christ frequently asked painful questions of those who were corrupt.

Conclusion

This series has examined just one small part of the Word of Wisdom, but an aspect that I think needs much more attention to give the principles of this revelation added context for our day. There are many other questions to explore and ponder, but the intersection of the revelation with science and the perversion of science in light of “conspiring men” strikes me as a perspective that may be important for better appreciating and applying its principles for our “temporal salvation” in an era of great danger.

Sadly, part of what we once thought was “science” seems to have become subjugated to an idolatrous “Cult of Science” where science is a tool for coercion and silencing opposition. In light of the Word of Wisdom and the Book of Mormon, we must recognize that the threat of conspiring men and secret combinations involves far more than foreign policy, higher taxes, and wasteful spending by corrupt men. It can also directly harm us or people we love when lies are presented as credentialed truth, causing unwholesome and harmful materials to enter into our bodies.

The Word of Wisdom, in light of the Book of Mormon, gives us a lens to view urgent issues of health more clearly. It helps us to not just eat healthier, but to be better prepared to resist evil and more protective of our families. The principles and the warnings of the Word of Wisdom, including the principle of not trusting conspiring men and being aware of their danger, can help us avoid harm and “find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures” as we study and seek for truth, including knowledge related to our physical wellbeing, that we might be able to” run and not be weary, and … walk and not faint” (Doctrine and Covenants 89:19–20).

In spite of my criticism of some scientists and leaders, many of those involved in what I have characterized as “secret combinations” or at least “greasy combinations” actually might not have realized how wrong their misdeeds were. Without a sound moral compass, they might not noticed anything nefarious with their “super secret” dialogs, as Kristian Andersen put it, and their “combination” to put down a “conspiracy theory” that knew was likely correct. After all, they were “just doing their jobs” or even worse, doing ugly things unto others “for the greater good”—both pernicious excuses that lead many to justify evil.

However, the Gospel of Jesus Christ asks us not to look to our employers, our funding sources, our political leaders, or our personal idols and celebrities, scientific or cultural, to guide our principles and actions. May we look to the Lord and His word for guidance, including the words of Mormon, Moroni, and others who warned us against secret combinations in our day that would even pose global threats (e.g., Ether 8:18–26) and the words of the Lord to Joseph Smith warning us about the threats to our physical health in these days when “conspiring men” will put us at physical risk (Doctrine & Covenants 89:1–4). Our job is not to obey the corrupt, but to hearken to the Lord and resist secret combinations and works of darkness “that evil may be done away” (Ether 8:26). Indeed, when the Lord speaks to us, the modern Gentiles, calling us to come unto Him in the closing words recorded in the book of 3 Nephi, it is not just a message of cheer and easy comfort. He first commands us that we must repent of the sinister things the Book of Mormon so often warns against: :

Turn, all ye Gentiles, from your wicked ways; and repent of your evil doings, of your lyings and deceivings, and of your whoredoms, and of your secret abominations, and your idolatries, and of your murders, and your priestcrafts, and your envyings, and your strifes, and from all your wickedness and abominations, and come unto me, and be baptized in my name, that ye may receive a remission of your sins, and be filled with the Holy Ghost, that ye may be numbered with my people who are of the house of Israel. (3 Nephi 30:2)

Deceit, lying, and secret abominations (a synonym in the Book of Mormon for “secret combinations” or “works of darkness”) are involved in the corruption of science that makes it an idolatrous tool for profit and power. The temporary rewards may be enticing, but we would do well to not be part of the problem.

Let us trust in the Lord and not the proclamations and harmful products of deceitful men seeking profit and gain at the expense of our health or freedom. We don’t have all the answers regarding the Word of Wisdom and the complex issues of diet and health, but with its prescient “forewarning,” we can be more prepared to ask better questions and be more cautious about whom we trust.