Jérôme Lemonnier, author of a book about mRNA vaccines, shares here a letter he received from the wife of Robert Malone. Who has been now tasked by the US government to evaluate all vaccines.

Basically, Mrs Malone wants you to know that her husband should have received that Nobel prize because he alone single-handedly invented mRNA vaccines. And this is also why he warns everyone of the deadly dangers of these vaccines.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Malone became a hero for all antivaxxers and covidiots out there, as he warned against facemasks and vaccines, and advised the US government and his followers to embrace ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine instead (or vitamin D, or famotidine, or fluvoxamine, anything really but vaccines!). Malone also celebrated the chloroquine quack Vladimir Zelenko (dead now) as “a hero who deserves the Nobel Prize for his heroic and effective way of saving the lives of many COVID-19 patients“.

Like every fascist, the US president and almost-dictator Donald Trump loves causing death and suffering, especially to those who can’t fight back. Migrants, minorities, poor people, or little children. Especially little children of poor Black and Latino minorities. That is why Trump installed the drug addict, sadist and antivaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr) as United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Predictably, RFK Jr immediately proceeded to get rid of vaccines, because what better way to get this children crippled or dead.

RFK Jr has his henchmen. In March 2025, he installed a certain David Geier as “senior data analyst” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to run clinical trials to investigate the alleged link between autism or vaccine, i.e. to confirm the worst antivax insanity postulated originally by Andrew Wakefield. David Geier’s only medical qualification is having being sentenced for practising medicine without licence. Together with his late father Mark Geier, they subjected autistic children to chemical castration therapy, read here:

In early June 2025, the anti-qualified Secretary of Health sacked all 17 members of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), having falsely accused them of having serious conflicts of interests with the pharma industry. He announced:

“A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy said in a statement, “ACIP new members will prioritize public health and evidence-based medicine. The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas.”

The competent medical scientists were replaced with anti-competent antivaxxers, as per RFK Jr’s announcement on X. NPR reported on 12 June 2024:

“The new members are Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln, Martin Kulldorff, Retsef Levi, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Cody Meissner, Dr. Michael A. Ross, Dr. James Pagano and Vicky Pebsworth.”

CBS brought a profile of these appointees. Martin Kulldorff is a COVID-19 contrarian who authored the so-called Great Barrington Declaration (i.e., let the virus run free) with Jay Bhattacharya, whom Trump and RFK Jr installed as director of the National Institutes of Health. Both men featured in this article:

Cody Meissner is a Dartmouth College professor of paediatrics and a friend of Trump’s anti-qualified FDA Commissioner Marty Makary.

Michael Ross falsely claims to be gynaecology professor at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, affiliations he never really held or doesn’t have for years already. His main anti-qualification however is having pushed for ivermectin as COVID-19 therapy.

The retired ER clinician James Pagano hasn’t anti-qualified himself publicly as antivaxxer or covidiot, but he proved to Trump by ranting against Obama’s Affordable Care Act that he hates poor people and wants them to die in pain and disease. The retired NIH researcher Joseph Hibbeln followed up on (false) claims on mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal as the cause for autism, and found in Golding et al 2018 “no consistent evidence from this study to implicate prenatal exposure to mercury in the etiology of autism“, but then again, a negative effect of mercury was found when no fish was eaten. Maybe RFK Jr saw Hibbeln’s potential to improve. MIT professor Retsef Levi proved his anti-qualifications by claiming on X that mRNA vaccines murder people:

Vicky Pebsworth is a professional antivaxxer, and research director of the so-called National Vaccine Information Center, which claims that vaccines cause autism and which was sponsored by the infamous antivaxxer and supplement scammer Joseph Mercola. In October 2020, the Center held an antivax covidiocy conference, whose attendees included next to Mercola also RFK-Jr plus celebrity antivaxxers Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield.

And then there is Robert Malone. His wife thinks he is a genius who deserves all the credit for everything and whose word must be heard. And indeed, Trump and RFK Jr listened to Mrs Malone.

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Robert Malone’s lies from his wife’s letter

By Jérôme Lemonnier

In May 2021, as my cousin Nicolas Lemonnier and I were writing “The Marathon of the Messenger. A History of messenger RNA vaccines“¹, we received a letter from Jill Malone reporting on the research carried out between 1986 and 1990 by her husband, Robert. On reading the letter, we understood that he had been working on messenger RNA at the time. Jill Malone’s letter dwells at length on these five years.

“Dr. Robert Malone was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the Salk Institute (1986 to 1988). Robert had just finished the first two years of Medical school at Northwestern in an MD/PhD program, when he chose to do his PhD graduate work at UCSD and the Salk Institute. […] At the Salk Institute/UCSD, he did his thesis work under Dr. Inder Verma on RNA structure and DNA/RNA gene transfer”.

Malone then joined the Vical biotech company, where he worked under Dr. Philip Felgner:

“…when Robert decided to leave the PhD program, he took a position at a brand-new company called Vical, Inc. in January 1989. He did this for me, so that I could finish my undergraduate degree, as well as so he could continue his research, before returning to medical school in Sept 1989. The plan was this would be a temporary position (8 months duration). Dr. Phillip Felgner recruited Robert into Vical to continue his research and set up a gene delivery/DNA/RNA vaccination program. “

His research at the Salk Institute and then at Vical focused on the transfection of messenger RNA. Robert Malone was a post-doc at the time, working under the supervision of Dr. Felgner. The aim of the experiments was to induce luciferase expression in mice, after injection of mRNA encapsulated in a liposome. The injections were carried out under the supervision of Dr. Jon Wolff of the University of Wisconsin :

“In early 1989, soon after joining Vical, Robert had been working on in-vivo cationic liposomal transfection and needed to perform blinded rodent studies. Vical did not have animal resources set up yet. Thus, he designed the experiments, made up the plasmids, DNA, RNA and reagents, wrote out directions and sent samples to Dr. Wolff at the University of Wisconsin who injected rats with blinded samples ».

This research was described in an article published in Science magazine in 1989². This article went on to play an important role in further research into messenger RNA therapies and vaccines.

Looking objectively at Jill Malone’s letter, it seems very surprising that it should be a PhD student or post-doc who claims to have played the starring role. Indeed, in scientific research, it is standard practice for an experienced professor (in this case, Dr. Felgner) to entrust work to a PhD student or post-doc. Consequently, it is certain that, without Dr. Felgner’s instructions, Robert Malone would not have carried out the experiments he did. As it happens, the idea of transfecting DNA or RNA using a liposome did originate with Dr. Felgner: in a 1987 article³, he expressly refers to this DNA transfection method, before considering that it could be used to transfect messenger RNA.

Then, in the summer of 1989, Robert Malone left Vical, and his contribution to the development of messenger RNA therapies and vaccines came to an end. Indeed, after this episodic contribution, he abandoned molecular biology research for the next thirty years. He eventually left the university and set up his own company with his wife in 2002.

Then, many years later, in 2019, came the Covid-19 pandemic. By the end of 2020, it was clear to everyone that messenger RNA therapies and vaccines would finally
enable the world to emerge from the pandemic. Jill Malone felt that now was the time to have her husband’s supposedly significant contribution recognized.
Thus began a veritable media hype and frantic communication on social networks.

This determined communication strategy led not only American science journalists, but also Fabrice Delaye and the authors of “The Marathon of the Messenger“, to attach a certain – in fact, quite exaggerated – importance to the research that Robert Malone had carried out in his day.

It was at a time when mRNA vaccines were gaining notoriety that the authors of “The Marathon of the Messenger” received Jill Malone’s letter, on May 23, 2021.
Clearly, in addition to the points already made, there are three things in this letter that are particularly noteworthy:

1. Jill and Robert Malone are very clear in their support for messenger RNA therapies and vaccines, even though the Covid-19 vaccination campaign had already been underway for several months: the letter expressly states that «Robert’s seminal research at the Salk Institute and continued at Vical and then after is now saving the world from COVID-19».
2. The letter emphasizes Robert Malone’s commitment to science above all else, despite the fact that, as a researcher, he clearly suffered harassment and psychological stress in the late 1980s. As Jill Malone puts it, «Robert has always said that: “the most important thing is the science and saving lives, not who gets credit.” But this is beyond who invented what, it is the derailment of a career, the ability to conduct science and a scientific legacy. This is a story about academic theft ».
3. A clear jealousy of Katalin Kariko [who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2023⁴, -LS]. As Jill Malone points out, «the Wiki pages for DNA, RNA transfection don’t even mention Robert’s name or his research. Let me repeat that: WIKI HAS NO MENTION OF ROBERT MALONE. There is no “Wiki page” or Google page for RobertMalone, unlike for Katalin Karikó. This frankly makes me sick. As the Univ of PA pushes for her Nobel and has obviously campaigned her accomplishments tirelessly, I have been absolutely shocked and sickened. […] Stat news, NY Times, etc are writing about Dr. Katalin Karikó as if she invented mRNA vaccines, rather than the very small improvements she has made to the existing technologies».

In this light, the letter is a particularly valuable document. For four years now, Robert Malone has been criticizing mRNA therapies and vaccines, even though he
knows that vaccines have helped the world to emerge from the pandemic, and that this new field of biomedical research holds great promise.

As Jill Malone’s letter makes clear, there is no scientific argument behind her husband’s sudden change of heart. It’s all a lie. So how do we explain this? How can we account for this veritable scientific and ethical betrayal, and the very denial of what he had been thinking for over thirty years?
Several reasons emerge. The letter refers to the feeling of having been “repeatedly intellectually raped”. But, in reality, this feeling is unfounded if we consider Robert Malone’s actual contribution, as well as the decades of research that went into making messenger RNA vaccines possible. Jealousy, bitterness and spite are clearly the real explanations for his sudden change of opinion, which can well be described as a lie.

It’s also very likely that, once Robert Malone realized that his lie was popular on Twitter, he felt that it finally meant the recognition he’d been waiting for for years. And today, this sinecure at anti-vax Robert Kennedy’s ACIP seems to compensate even more for the feeling of lack of recognition evoked in his wife’s letter.

So, in the absence of scientific recognition, which of course will never come, it now seems increasingly likely that Robert Malone will only go down in history as an opportunistic profiteer from Donald Trump’s second term. What a pathetic and sad price to pay for his lie!

Because, yes, Robert Malone did lie to everyone, and first and foremost to himself. In doing so, he has adopted the posture denounced in his letter: what’s most important to him is not science, but getting credit. Under these conditions, how can he honestly look at himself today, knowing what he knows about
mRNA therapies and vaccines, and all the promises that go with them? Even though his position in Robert Kennedy’s ACIP actually leads him to betray his convictions on a daily basis?

This cowardice, this lying to oneself, these are certainly the things that gradually change a man’s thoughts, and make him, today, a person who has betrayed his ideals and the very life he once dreamed of.

Footnotes

1. Jérôme & Nicolas Lemonnier, “The Marathon of the Messenger. A History of Messenger RNA Vaccines“, ed. Springer Nature, 2023. The Marathon of The Messenger has been written in collaboration with Pr. Steve Pascolo and Chantal Pichon. It presents the history of mRNA vaccines, combining a scientific background with historical and economic perspectives. Illustrations by Gilles Charrot. ↩︎
2. Cf. Jon A. Wolff, Robert W. Malone, Phillip Williams, Wang Chong, Gyula Acsadi, Agnes Jani, Philip. L. Felgner, «Direct Gene Transfer into Mouse Muscle in Vivo», Science, 23 March 1990, vol. 247. DOI: 10.1126/science.1690918. This article follows on from the one on research carried out earlier at the Salk Institute: R. W. Malone, P. L. Felgner and I. M. Verma, “Cationic liposome-mediated RNA transfection”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, August 1989 ; n° 86 (16) : p. 6077-6081. DOI : 10.1073/pnas.86.16.6077. ↩︎
3. P L Felgner, T R Gadek, M. Holm, R Roman, H W Chan, M. Wenz, J P Northrop, G M Ringold, M. Danielsen, «Lipofection: A highly efficient lipid-mediated DNA-transfection procedure», Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, November 1987 ; 84(21):7413-7. DOI: 10.1073/PNAS.84.21.7413. ↩︎
4. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023, announcement: “In 2005 Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman discovered that certain modifications of the building blocks of RNA prevented unwanted inflammatory reactions and increased the production of desired proteins. The discovery laid the foundation for effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020.” [footnote by LS] ↩︎

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Jill Malone’s letter, in full:

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PS by LS

In 2018, Malone’s former boss at Salk Institute Inder Verma was accused of sexual harassment of Salk Institute subordinates, as Science reported:

“In reports stretching from 1976 to 2016, women allege, variously, that he grabbed their breasts, pinched their buttocks, forcibly kissed them, propositioned them, and repeatedly commented on their physical attributes in professional settings. The allegations come from a Salk lab technician, a postdoctoral researcher, other Salk staffers and faculty, and women outside of the institute, including a potential faculty recruit. […] For decades, women at Salk have warned female colleagues not to be alone with Verma.”

Verma was then kicked out from Salk Institute and from the National Academy of Sciences, both as Editor-in-Chief of PNAS and as Academy Member.

In her letter, Jill Malone focusses a lot on Verma, obviously inspired by these 2018 revelations. She claims her husband was abused by Verma just like all those other women, and describes how exactly:

“As Robert was the only graduate student in a 20-person post-doc lab, Robert was very vulnerable to Dr. Verma’s harassment. Gender abuse is just one facet of cyclic abusive behavior, and Dr Verma set up a cycle of abusive behavior towards Robert early on. Examples of the typical workplace behavior included Dr. Verma routinely offering grant applications and papers that he was to review to Robert, with instructions to “read them for ideas.””

Is there any better way to ridicule the victims of Verma’s sexual harassment? Mrs Malone then narrates how, having all by himself invented the mRNA vaccine technology, her young husband “with Dr. Verma’s permission, set up a collaboration with Syntex/Dr. Phil Felgner in January, 1988” (mediated by Tony Hunter!). But then that stupid Felgner stole Malone’s discovery, and Verma also wanted to a piece of action, and threatened massive retaliation if Malone doesn’t include him on his patent. The conspiracy against her genius husband was “criminal”, as Mrs Malone repeats.

In his desperation, young Robert decided against pursuing a PhD. That was also because UC San Diego, where he was supposed to graduate, proved too stupid to understand the immense genius of his ideas (“his thinking and research […] was so far ahead that the committee didn’t understand it“). Please appreciate this:

“At one point in 1988, Robert felt so abused, that he went to the UCSD mental health clinic, who diagnosed him with severe PTSD from the abuse. The mental health professional told Robert that his levels were the same as someone coming back from Vietnam. […] In our 45 years together, I have never witnessed anywhere the level of abuse that Robert endured. I can’t describe how much Dr. Verma’s abuse affected Robert.”

Wait, Mrs Malone can also ridicule victims of famine:

“Dr. Verma, Dr. Felgner, Dr. Wolff all became rich off of Robert’s work, while we, including our child, literally starved during his last two years of medical school and continued to have financial issues throughout the next decade.”

No. Is Malone a deranged narcissist? Yes. I mean, how else can one decry COVID-19 vaccines as murder tools while your wife lobbies on your behalf with:

“Yes- Robert’s seminal research at the Salk Institute and continued at Vical and then after is now saving the world from COVID-19.”

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