2020 to today
2020 to today
Section 702 searches, license plate cameras, data center deals, private equity in housing, deaths in ICE custody, and the Epstein files.
Key facts
- The FBI made 278,000 improper searches of Americans' communications under Section 702.
- Cities and counties sign nondisclosure agreements before voting on data centers.
- 269 of the 469 entries on the site fall in this period.
Timeline
47 events in Health, Food & Regulators, oldest first
- 2020February 5, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
Fauci to Burwell: masks not really effective; I do not recommend that you wear a mask
Released under FOIA in June 2021.
- March 10, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
PREP Act declaration: vaccine makers immune from suit except for willful misconduct
Signed before there was a vaccine.
- March 27, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
The CARES Act adds 20 percent to Medicare's payment for every inpatient with a COVID-19 diagnosis
From September 1, 2020 a positive test had to be on the chart; a second add-on payment for new treatments followed in November.
- July 22, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
$1.95 billion to Pfizer for 100 million doses of an unauthorized vaccine
A second $1.95 billion on December 23.
- September 16, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
House report: grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA on the 737 MAX
346 dead; Boeing's own employees certified the plane.
- October 14, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
JBS's owners plead guilty to foreign bribery in a U.S. court and pay $256 million
The SEC: $150 million in bribes, in part to buy Pilgrim's Pride.
- October 22, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
The FDA approves remdesivir seven days after the WHO's Solidarity trial found it had little or no effect on death
The first drug approved for COVID-19; a month later the WHO's guideline panel recommended against it in hospitalized patients.
- November 9, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
Pfizer's chief executive sells $5.6 million of stock the day the results are announced
Under a plan adopted August 19, 2020.
- November 24, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
Purdue pleads guilty to three felonies
$8.3 billion on paper, mostly uncollectable.
- December 10, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
The BBC, AP, Reuters, the Washington Post, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and other partners announce a joint effort against vaccine disinformation
The Trusted News Initiative: partners will alert each other to disinformation which poses an immediate threat to life.
- December 24, 2020Health, Food & Regulators
Fauci: I can nudge this up a bit, so I went to 80, 85
The herd immunity number moved with the polls.
- 2021July 20, 2021Health, Food & Regulators
Fauci to Senator Paul: you do not know what you are talking about
Three months before NIH wrote to Congress about the EcoHealth experiment.
- August 21, 2021Health, Food & Regulators
The FDA posts: You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it.
Three doctors sued over the posts; the randomized trials of ivermectin, published the next year, found no benefit.
- October 20, 2021Health, Food & Regulators
NIH to Congress: EcoHealth failed to report a finding right away, as the grant required
Five days to hand over all unpublished data.
- 2022January 6, 2022Health, Food & Regulators
Judge orders the FDA to release Pfizer's data at 55,000 pages a month, not 500
A request of paramount public importance.
- August 10, 2022Health, Food & Regulators
Camp Lejeune Justice Act: the right to sue, after decades
409,910 claims filed in two years.
- 2023February 3, 2023Health, Food & Regulators
Norfolk Southern train derails in East Palestine
Five cars of vinyl chloride burned over the town three days later.
- September 1, 2023Health, Food & Regulators
The Fifth Circuit: FDA is not a physician
The court held the agency had no authority to tell consumers to stop taking a medicine; in 2024 the FDA settled and deleted the posts.
- October 31, 2023Health, Food & Regulators
Flint prosecutions closed with no convictions
Every charge thrown out over the one judge grand jury.
- 2024March 20, 2024Health, Food & Regulators
The last Guatemala suit ends; the appeals court affirms for the private defendant
It was our own government that was the driving force behind these monstrous wrongs.
- April 1, 2024Health, Food & Regulators
Alaska and Canada suspend fishing for Yukon River king salmon for seven years, one full life cycle, after the run falls about 90 percent from its 1980s level
The suspension holds regardless of how many fish return. Alaska also committed to reduce ocean catches and bycatch of Yukon salmon to the extent practicable.
- June 25, 2024Health, Food & Regulators
NTSB: the East Palestine burn was not necessary
The chemical maker's dissent never reached the incident commander.
- September 25, 2024Health, Food & Regulators
$600 million East Palestine settlement approved
Injury payments release the railroad from future health claims.
- 2025January 17, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
HHS debars EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak for five years
A lack of business integrity and business honesty.
- January 19, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
Fauci pardoned for anything from January 1, 2014 to the date of the pardon
He said he had committed no crime.
- June 25, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
FDA requires an expanded myocarditis warning on the mRNA vaccines
About 27 cases per million doses in males 12 to 24.
- July 7, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
VA to shed nearly 30,000 employees by September 30
484,000 in January to about 455,000.
- September 12, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
Senate committee releases Fauci emails: please delete this e-mail after you read it
To the NIH director in February 2020 and to his chief of staff in July.
- November 6, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
Boeing criminal case dismissed for $1.1 billion
The judge: it fails to secure the necessary accountability.
- November 12, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
43 day shutdown ends with a promise of a vote on the health credits
The vote fails in December.
- November 18, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
Purdue bankruptcy plan confirmed; Sacklers to pay up to $7 billion over 15 years
Opt in releases after the Supreme Court struck the first plan.
- December 31, 2025Health, Food & Regulators
Enhanced premium credits expire
Three million fewer people insured by February.
- 2026January 8, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
House passes a three year extension of the health credits, 230 to 196
The Senate never takes it up.
- March 4, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
Indiana's supreme court holds a hospital system immune under the PREP Act for a ventilated COVID-19 patient's death
The ventilator was a covered countermeasure; the estate's claim that a bed sore went untreated was barred.
- March 10, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
2,531 Camp Lejeune settlements approved since 2023
Of 409,910 claims.
- April 29, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
Judge sentencing Purdue: your government failed you
$5.5 billion on paper; $225 million to be collected.
- June 17, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
VA inspector general: half of referrals miss the timeliness standards
Inside the department and in private care.
- July 29, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
Fauci invokes the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times under Senate subpoena
The pardon ended January 19, 2025.
- August 6, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
Senate committee votes 8 to 5 to hold Fauci in contempt
To be certified to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
- August 10, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
Camp Lejeune payments pass $827 million
Offers past $1 billion.
- August 20, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
JBS co-owner Joesley Batista meets the President in the Oval Office about the beef tariff
The plan was announced the next day; the White House says no one conversation decided it.
- August 26, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
Proclamation opens the quota to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef trimmings, about 660 million pounds
An estimated $650 million in tariffs waived for foreign sellers; cattle futures fell on the announcement.
- September 1, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
42,438 radiation compensation claims waiting
9,919 approved and $694.7 million paid under the 2025 law.
- September 3, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
WHO's portal: the Gates Foundation its largest contributor for 2024 and 2025, above the United States
$761.1 million to $751.6 million.
- September 3, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
The European Union stops accepting Brazilian beef over antibiotic use, the week the U.S. quota opens
Brazil could not guarantee its cattle were raised without growth-promoting antimicrobials.
- September 16, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
Senator Johnson announces a roundtable on hospital COVID-19 protocols for September 28
Patients, families, doctors, and nurses, in the Kennedy Caucus Room.
- September 28, 2026Health, Food & Regulators
At a Senate roundtable, patients, relatives, nurses, and doctors describe how they say hospitals treated COVID-19 patients; no hospital or health agency takes part
Sen. Ron Johnson said his office had received 583 testimonies from 46 states and would post testimony from anyone with a different view.
Stories (9)
- 1992 to 2026Pfizer's Record: The $2.3 Billion Fraud Guilty Plea, the Nigerian Drug Trial, and the 2020 COVID Vaccine ContractIn 2009 a Pfizer subsidiary pleaded guilty to a felony and the company paid $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the Justice Department's history, for selling drugs for uses the FDA had refused to approve, while, in the prosecutor's words, it was in his office settling the same conduct by a company it had just bought. In 1996 it tested an antibiotic on 200 Nigerian children during a meningitis epidemic without consent, eleven of them died, and a State Department cable later recorded that it hired investigators to dig up dirt on the Nigerian attorney general to make the case go away. In 2012 it settled bribery charges in eight countries. In 2020 the United States agreed to pay it $1.95 billion for 100 million doses of a vaccine that carried immunity from suit under a federal declaration, and when a court was asked for the trial data, the FDA proposed a schedule that would have taken more than half a century. Comirnaty brought in $36.8 billion in 2021 and $37.8 billion in 2022, and the chief executive sold $5.6 million of stock the day the results were announced.Health, Food & Regulators
- 1953 to 2026Camp Lejeune's Poisoned Drinking Water (1953–1987) and 409,000 Veteran and Family ClaimsFrom 1953 to 1987 the drinking water at the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina carried industrial solvents at up to 280 times the level now allowed. The base's own tests found the chemicals in 1980. The wells stayed in service until 1985 and 1987. The government's health agency has since found higher rates of kidney cancer, leukemia, and other diseases among the Marines and civilians who drank it, and birth defects and childhood cancers among the children born there. In 2022 Congress let them sue. 409,910 claims were filed. As of March 2026, 2,531 had been settled, and as of August 10, 2026 the government had paid $827 million.Health, Food & Regulators
- February 3, 2023 to 2024East Palestine, Ohio Train Derailment: The NTSB Found the Vinyl Chloride Chemical Burn Was UnnecessaryOn February 3, 2023 a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio after a wheel bearing that the railroad's own trackside sensors had watched overheat for thirty miles finally failed. Three days later, on the railroad's advice, officials vented and burned five tank cars of vinyl chloride over the town. The National Transportation Safety Board found in June 2024 that the burn was not necessary, and that the railroad and its contractors had kept the chemical maker's dissent from the officials who made the decision. The railroad settled with the government for $310 million and with residents for $600 million, in exchange for the residents' right to sue over their health. No one was charged. The rail safety bill written after the wreck never passed.Health, Food & Regulators
- 1981 to 2026Alaska's Yukon King Salmon Collapse and Factory Trawler Bycatch in the Bering SeaThe Yukon River's king salmon run averaged nearly 400,000 fish a year from 1981 to 1997 and fell below 40,000 in 2022 and 2023. Fishing for Yukon kings has been closed since 2021, and in 2024 Alaska and Canada agreed to suspend it for seven years. In 2025 the pollock trawl fleet in the Bering Sea caught 19,773 king salmon and 151,334 other salmon as bycatch, and trawlers in the Gulf of Alaska caught 15,698 kings and 15,965 other salmon. NOAA's scientists tie the collapse mainly to a warming ocean, and a 2026 study found that bycatch had little effect on the one Yukon stock it examined. Many Alaskans blame the trawl fleet and the federal council that regulates it, where in 2024 four of the eleven voting members worked in or had financial ties to the trawl industry. The fight has become a central issue in Alaska's 2026 Senate race.Health, Food & Regulators
- 2018 to 2026Boeing 737 MAX Crashes: How the FAA Let Boeing Certify Its Own Planes and the DOJ Dropped Criminal ChargesTwo new Boeing 737 MAX jets crashed in October 2018 and March 2019, killing 346 people, because of a flight control system the company had not fully disclosed to the regulator, the airlines, or the pilots. A congressional investigation found a horrific culmination of faulty assumptions, a lack of transparency, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA, which had delegated much of the plane's certification to Boeing's own employees. The Justice Department charged the company with fraud and let it defer prosecution for $2.5 billion. Boeing broke the agreement, a door blew off another MAX in 2024, and in 2025 the government dropped the charge for $1.1 billion. A federal judge said the deal failed to secure the necessary accountability, and that he could not stop it.Health, Food & Regulators
- 2021 to 2026The 2026 Health Insurance Premium Spike After ACA Tax Credits ExpiredThe larger premium credits that had made insurance on the exchanges affordable since 2021 expired on December 31, 2025. Congress shut the government for 43 days over them in the fall, took a Senate vote that failed, passed a three year extension in the House in January by 230 to 196, and let it die. Enrollment fell from 22.1 million to 19.2 million, premium payments rose 58 percent for the people who stayed, deductibles rose $1,000, and the budget office expects more than 4 million more people uninsured by 2034, on top of the 10 million from the July 2025 law.Health, Food & Regulators
- 1984 to 2026Anthony Fauci's Record: Private Mask Emails, Wuhan Lab Grants, Preemptive Pardon, and Pleadings of the FifthAnthony Fauci ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, was the highest paid employee of the federal government, and in 2020 became the government's voice on the pandemic. The government's own documents record: the email in which he told a cabinet secretary that masks are not really effective and that he did not recommend one, a month before he said the same on television and four months before he explained the advice had been about preserving supply; the herd immunity number he said he nudged up as the polls moved; the six-foot rule that, in his words to Congress, sort of just appeared; the Senate testimony that NIH had not funded a kind of research in Wuhan, and the NIH letter five months later describing an experiment there that EcoHealth failed to report; the audit, the suspension, and the debarment of the grantee; the pardon covering January 2014 to January 2025; the emails in which he wrote please delete this e-mail after you read it; and the day in July 2026 when, under subpoena, he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times, after which a Senate committee voted to hold him in contempt.Health, Food & Regulators
- 2007 to 2026The August 2026 Tariff Waiver for 660 Million Pounds of Foreign Beef Six Days After JBS Met the PresidentOn August 26, 2026 the President signed a proclamation letting 300,000 metric tons of foreign lean beef trimmings, about 660 million pounds, into the country over three months at the low in-quota tariff instead of the 26.4 percent rate that applies above the quota, on the stated ground that ground beef had become too expensive. The Wall Street Journal reported that six days earlier the co-owner of JBS, Joesley Batista, had met the President in the Oval Office and argued for exactly that; the announcement came the next day, and the White House said the decision "was not done as the result of any one conversation." JBS is the Brazilian company whose owners pleaded guilty in the United States in 2020 to bribery, admitted in Brazil to paying nearly 1,900 politicians, and bought their American packing plants with money from a Brazilian state bank. In 2017 the Agriculture Department had halted fresh Brazilian beef after refusing 11 percent of it at the border against 1 percent for the rest of the world. Since 2015 beef in the store has not had to say what country it came from. The week the quota opened, Europe stopped taking Brazilian beef over antibiotic use, the American cattle herd stood at its smallest since 1951, cattle prices fell, and the retail price of ground beef was $6.92 a pound.Health, Food & Regulators
- 2017 to 2026COVID-19 Hospital Payment Bonuses, Remdesivir Approval, PREP Act Hospital Immunity, and Pre-2020 Pandemic PlansIn 2020 Congress paid hospitals 20 percent more for every Medicare patient with a COVID-19 diagnosis and then added a bonus for new treatments, the Food and Drug Administration approved remdesivir seven days after the World Health Organization's own trial found it had little or no effect on death, the government told the public not to take ivermectin in words a federal appeals court later said it had no authority to use, and the March 2020 declaration that gave drugmakers immunity was read by a state supreme court in 2026 to shield a hospital from a patient's death. The plans written before the pandemic had said not to do most of what was done: the government's 2017 guidance said an exposed household in a severe pandemic should stay home for up to three days, and the WHO's 2019 guidance said quarantine of the exposed and contact tracing were not recommended in any circumstances. At a Senate roundtable on September 28, 2026, patients, relatives, nurses, and doctors described what they say was done to patients in hospitals; no hospital or health agency took part, and the senator's office has released no report on it.Health, Food & Regulators