Special to WorldTribune, May 5, 2026
Commentary by R. Clinton Ohlers
[A]s somebody that was in the early COVID research area, was there a moment when . . . you were like ‘Holy sh*t, there is something extremely wrong with what is going on here and what we are being told?’” I was asked in a recent interview.
The path from trust in the system to clear-eyed awareness has many turns. …. For me, [it was] the dawning awareness that a pivotal Journal of the American Medical Association study on whether or not hydroxychloroquine bestowed any benefits in New York during the early days of the pandemic appeared to have been written not to answer that question, but to obscure the very data that would have saved lives.
The article that resulted was “Effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine was hiding in plain sight” and appeared in WorldTribune.com in September of 2020. It was on the basis of this article primarily that when SafeBlood was starting in the U.S. in late 2022, I was asked to join to represent the science to the media.
But it was an earlier awakening that made this article and its awakening possible. That I owe to to Chris Martensen of Peak Prosperity, the actor Mark Ruffalo, and to that arch villain of the early 21st century himself, the diabolical Dr. Fauci.
Back in Hong Kong in late January and early February of 2020, before COVID had its name and were were all just talking about this virus out of Wuhan, my wife discovered Dr. Chris Martensen’s Peak Prosperity on YouTube. Martensen, a Yale PhD in pathology, was doing daily updates on the outbreak.
Perched on the other side of the world and only three hours by high speed rail with two trains a day coming in from Wuhan, we were rather motivated to find good information. The regular Western broadcast media was almost useless, and we quickly realized Martensen was one of very few at the time with genuine insight.
By the spring of ‘20 Martensen was defying his audience with his insistence that there was more to the story about hydroxychloroquine. He didn’t have a dog in the fight. He just couldn’t get around the science, or rather the poor quality of the science that was attempting to claim it didn’t work.
This brought to my attention the importance of things like of azithromycin in combination with hydroxychloroquine, a person’s zinc levels, the fact that a real study on it at this moment in history where time was of the essence could be done well in only six weeks, maybe less.
It also introduced a new concept to my trusting university academic self, trained to believe in the peer-review process and the sanctity of the double-blind placebo trial.
The concept: “designed to fail.”
In April of 2020, the night before NIH announced the start of Fauci’s promised placebo control trial of hydroxychloroquine, my wife and I chose Dark Waters (2019), starring Mark Ruffalo, for date night.
Ruffalo plays attorney Robert Bilott in his 25-year investigation and legal battle to bring DuPont to account for poisoning the drinking water in West Virginian communities with the by-product of Teflon. The results for people included cancer, frightening birth defects, and alarming damage to teeth and bones. Deaths in livestock were grotesque.
What is truly chilling about the film is not that DuPont tried to conceal their wrong doing. The chilling part is why. As depicted in the film, executives at DuPont knew to conceal their activities because they had already done studies internally that showed the harmful effects on human health — they had done the studies but refused to impede $1 billion a year in revenue from Teflon over the mere issue of waste disposal and whom it would harm.
That movie was a wake-up call. It reordered my conception of human evil and profit. And it did so in the nick of time.
Related: Effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine was hiding in plain sight, September 21, 2020
The next morning I read the announcement of the NIH study.
It was going to take roughly five months to collect the data. Then, for sake of thoroughness, another year or more would be dedicated to painstakingly analyzing the data so that the effectiveness of the drug combination could be revealed to the world. Of course, the pandemic should be over by then. No mention was made of assessing the subjects’ zinc levels.
Designed to fail. It would even be halted just two months later.
When my wife got home I told her, “We are on our own in this pandemic. They don’t care how many of us die.”
Deception on Display
By the summer of 2021, whenever I saw Fauci come on TV I’d gather a certain group of impressionable young people and make them watch.
I loved to watch Fauci give an interview. I still do.
Sure, like just about every reader of this post, I can’t stand Fauci, but I loved watching him perform live. I loved seeing how many outright lies he could string together in a single update.
It was important to me that young people understand how a great liar appears at the very moment he is lying to you.
Much like getting the chance to watch a master pickpocket in action, if you get the chance you have to take it. Normally, artistry of this kind means that one isn’t aware of it. So, when one is, observe and take notes.
It reminds me of the old idea that the devil doesn’t appear with horns, a pitchfork, and a red suit. He will be debonaire, sophisticated, and order only the finest at his table. It makes me recall what was insightful in the popularity of the vampire craze of the early 2000s. When I grew up vampires were creepy, hideous.
By the early 2000s, they were smashingly good looking, magnificently wealthy, and threw all the best parties.
The impeccable attire. The silvered avuncular image. The compelling confidence. A voice at once soothing and commanding.
Deceiver par excellence.
R. Clinton Ohlers, PhD is former Investigative Editor at WorldTribune.com and currently Vice President of SafeBlood Donation. He was Research Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong at the time of the Covid outbreak in early 2020.
The art of deception: My introduction to the Covid pandemic and the Fauci phenomenon added by Editor One on
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