The Jesuit Network: Fauci, Redfield, Cuomo, and Newsom
One of the more remarkable and under-remarked features of the COVID-19 response in the United States is how many of its key architects shared the same educational formation. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and became the face of the pandemic response, was educated at Regis High School in New York — a no-tuition Jesuit college-preparatory institution on the Upper East Side — and at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, another Jesuit institution. Fauci himself has spoken openly and warmly about the formative influence of his Jesuit education on his career, crediting the Jesuit emphasis on intellectual rigour, organisation, and logic for much of his professional approach.
Dr. Robert Redfield, who served as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention throughout the pandemic, is a graduate of Georgetown University, the flagship Jesuit institution in the United States. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, whose decisions during the pandemic were among the most consequential and most damaging of any American official, is a graduate of Fordham University, another Jesuit institution. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who imposed some of the most restrictive lockdown orders in the nation — banning outdoor religious services while permitting outdoor dining and protest gatherings — attended Santa Clara University, a Jesuit school, and has credited his Jesuit education with shaping his political outlook. The World Union of Jesuit Alumni, in a 2020 article, noted with evident pride that Fauci, Cuomo, and Newsom were all Jesuit alumni playing central roles in managing the pandemic.
This is not to suggest a conspiracy in the narrow sense. But the Jesuit Order has a well-documented political philosophy that is collectivist, internationalist, and sympathetic to state management of society — a philosophy with roots going back to the Jesuit reductions in South America and forward to the social teaching of Jesuit Pope Francis. Those educated in that tradition carry its assumptions about the proper role of the state, the subordination of individual liberty to collective management, and the authority of credentialled experts. These assumptions were on full display in 2020 and 2021.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s role in the nursing home catastrophe deserves particular note. In March 2020, Cuomo issued an order requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients discharged from hospitals — sending infected individuals directly into the facilities housing the most vulnerable population in the state. The result was thousands of preventable deaths. Cuomo’s administration subsequently underreported the nursing home death toll by thousands, a cover-up that the New York Attorney General later substantiated. Cuomo received an Emmy Award for his pandemic briefings while thousands of elderly New Yorkers were dying in facilities he had seeded with the infected.
The Vatican itself, under Jesuit Pope Francis, fully endorsed the global pandemic response, including vaccination mandates. Francis publicly called opposition to vaccines selfish and immoral and used the moral authority of the papacy to reinforce government pressure on populations to comply. He permitted the Vatican to implement its own vaccine passport system. The same Roman Catholic Church that had governed its faithful through plague after plague in previous centuries — never once closing churches or suspending the sacraments on government order — in 2020 closed its churches and supported every measure the civil governments imposed.
Bill Gates, the WHO, and the Architecture of Global Health Control
No figure was more aggressively promoted during the pandemic as an expert on infectious disease than Bill Gates — a man whose qualifications consist of dropping out of Harvard and becoming a software billionaire. The mainstream media treated Gates as an authority on virology, vaccine development, global health policy, and pandemic preparedness, despite his having no medical training of any kind. The explanation for this extraordinary elevation lies in money.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation became, in the years before the pandemic, the World Health Organization’s second largest source of funding — contributing 9.5 percent of the WHO’s total revenues between 2010 and 2023, according to a BMJ analysis published in 2025. The Gates Foundation directed more than $4.5 billion to the WHO over this period, with more than 80 percent of that funding targeted at infectious diseases and more than half at vaccine programmes. The United States was the WHO’s largest funder, but the Gates Foundation’s influence exceeded its raw dollar contribution because its grants were targeted — they came with conditions about how the money was to be spent — while government contributions were more general. The WHO’s priorities, the BMJ analysis concluded, had been shaped by its reliance on targeted grants from donor organisations such as the Gates Foundation.
Since January 2020, the Gates Foundation committed more than $2 billion to the global COVID-19 response, including major investments in COVAX — the global vaccine distribution initiative — and in Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Gates and the Foundation were positioned at the intersection of the WHO, the vaccine manufacturers, the global distribution infrastructure, and the media narrative that promoted all of them. When the pandemic began, Gates was already on record predicting a global pandemic and calling for the world to prepare with mass vaccination programmes. When the pandemic arrived, he was immediately positioned as the expert voice on what should be done. What should be done, in his telling, was exactly what would be done: global lockdowns maintained until vaccination was achieved, vaccines developed and distributed through the organisations he funded, and dissent from this agenda suppressed as dangerous misinformation.
The financial architecture of the pandemic response — government funding, Gates Foundation funding, pharmaceutical company participation, WHO coordination, Big Tech censorship — was not a conspiracy in the sense of a secret meeting in a back room. It was an openly constructed system of interlocking interests, built over years, that happened to align perfectly around a single agenda when the pandemic arrived. Those who benefited from the system promoted it. Those who challenged it were silenced. The pharmaceutical companies that produced the vaccines under Operation Warp Speed were given billions in public money and indemnified against legal liability for adverse effects. The media companies that promoted the official narrative received advertising revenue from government vaccination campaigns. The social media platforms that censored dissent received cooperation and credit from the administration. There was no need for a conspiracy. The incentives were sufficient.
“Stop the Spread, Take the Vaccine”: The Promise That Was Not True
The central promise of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign was simple: get vaccinated to stop the spread. This was the message on every billboard, in every public service announcement, in every government briefing. The vaccines were presented not merely as a protection against severe disease for the individual but as a means of ending the pandemic for everyone — of achieving the herd immunity that would allow normal life to resume. Those who declined vaccination were portrayed as selfish, as endangering others, as morally culpable for the continuation of the pandemic.
This promise turned out not to be true. It became apparent within months of the mass vaccination rollout that the COVID vaccines — whatever their benefits in reducing severity of illness for some individuals — did not reliably prevent infection or transmission. Vaccinated people were getting COVID. In many cases, vaccinated people were getting COVID at rates that exceeded those of unvaccinated people with natural immunity from prior infection. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals, including a 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Network Open, found that protection against laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection fell below 20 percent at 6 months from the primary vaccination cycle and below 30 percent at 9 months from a booster dose. The CDC’s own tracking acknowledged that vaccine effectiveness waned significantly over time and that, in populations with high levels of infection-induced immunity from prior COVID infection, vaccine effectiveness estimates could fall to negative values — meaning the vaccinated were, by some measures, more likely to test positive than the unvaccinated.
None of this was presented to the public at the time the mandates were imposed. People were told to take the vaccine or lose their jobs. Members of the military were told to take the vaccine or face discharge. Healthcare workers were told to take the vaccine or be terminated. Students were told to take the vaccine or be denied university attendance. These coercive measures were imposed on the basis of a promise that the vaccines would stop the spread — a promise that the manufacturers themselves had not made in their clinical trials, which were designed only to assess reduction in symptomatic illness, not transmission.
The censorship apparatus described in Part 1 was in full operation to prevent this information from reaching the public. Stories of people testing positive for COVID after vaccination were among the topics explicitly listed for suppression in the Unified Strategies Group’s coordination sessions between federal agencies and Big Tech. People sharing their personal experiences of post-vaccination COVID infection were deplatformed. The dissenting doctors and scientists — the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, the physicians who questioned the mandates, the virologists who challenged the narrative on natural immunity — were publicly denounced as dangerous and professionally undermined, while the emails later revealed that the denunciations were coordinated at the highest levels of the NIH and the Fauci apparatus.
The vaccines were about state control, not health. That is a strong statement and requires evidence to support it. The evidence is in the coercion. A health intervention that is genuinely effective for the individual does not require mandates. If the vaccine protected the vaccinated, then the unvaccinated posed no threat to them. If natural immunity was as protective as or more protective than vaccine immunity — which multiple studies suggested — then mandates for those with natural immunity served no health purpose whatever. The mandates made sense only in the context of a political objective: universal compliance, demonstrated submission, and the establishment of the principle that the state has authority to make medical decisions on behalf of citizens and punish those who refuse.
China’s Christians: The Pandemic as Persecution
For the underground church in China, the COVID-19 pandemic brought not a pause in persecution but an acceleration of it. The Chinese Communist Party, which had been tightening its grip on religious practice under Xi Jinping’s Sinicization campaign since 2017, used the pandemic’s restrictions on gathering as a convenient and officially unassailable instrument for suppressing house churches entirely.
Bob Fu, founder of ChinaAid and one of the foremost advocates for persecuted Chinese Christians, stated plainly: the Chinese Communist Party had intensified its persecution of Christians by banning all church activities — even worship services and prayer meetings in believers’ own homes with their own family members — under the pretext of COVID-19. While malls and restaurants in provinces like Zhejiang could operate, churches were required to remain closed. Local authorities throughout China used the pandemic period to require churches to install closed-circuit cameras with facial recognition technology, enabling them to monitor attendance, sermons, and leadership. Church gatherings that resumed were surveilled as they had never been before.
At the start of the pandemic, a Christian leader in Shandong called for seven days of fasting and online prayer for coronavirus victims. Public security agents accused him of engaging in illegal religious activities and placed him under administrative detention. In Jiangsu province, authorities used the lockdown as an opportunity to demolish a church building. In February 2021, authorities shut down the live-streamed sermons of Wenzhou pastor Huang Yizi. A Shandong house church reported receiving warnings in 2014, then fire and electrical inspections in 2018, then the demand to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement — and then, during the pandemic, a complete prohibition on meeting under any circumstances whatsoever. The pandemic did not create the persecution. It provided a new vocabulary for justifying it.
The crackdowns have continued and intensified as COVID restrictions lifted. In October 2025, police detained dozens of pastors and staff connected to the Zion Church network — a congregation of approximately 5,000 regular worshippers across nearly 50 cities — in what observers described as the largest crackdown since the raid on Early Rain Covenant Church in 2018. In 2024, 810 individuals were confirmed detained in China for religious reasons, a figure that does not account for the vast number of unrecorded cases. The authorities have used charges of financial fraud — targeting the Christian practice of tithing — to financially strangle house church networks. Online Christian content has been aggressively censored. The pattern is systematic, patient, and comprehensive: use every available tool — including pandemic restrictions — to constrict the space in which the church can exist, until it has nowhere left to gather.
Our article on the house church in China and Iran covers this situation in more detail. See The Underground Church: House Churches in China and Iran.
The World That Did Not Bounce Back
The pandemic is over, or at least the acute phase of it is. COVID-19 has receded from the front pages. The emergency powers have been formally lifted in most jurisdictions. Life has resumed, after a fashion. But the world has not bounced back. It is not the same as it was, and it is worth being honest about what has changed and what has not changed back.
Economically, the consequences of the lockdowns continue to unfold. Trillions of dollars of debt were accumulated by governments during the pandemic, much of it through direct payments, business subsidies, and healthcare spending that was largely improvised and poorly targeted. Inflation followed, eroding the savings and purchasing power of ordinary people in every major economy. Supply chains disrupted during the lockdowns have been partially restructured but not restored. Small businesses that were forced to close did not uniformly reopen. The concentration of economic power in large corporations — Amazon, Walmart, and the other entities classified as essential while independent businesses were ordered shut — increased substantially during the pandemic and has not reversed.
Politically, the precedents established during the pandemic remain in place, waiting to be invoked again. Governments demonstrated that they could, on the basis of a declared health emergency, impose lockdowns, mandate medical procedures, restrict religious assembly, censor dissent, and deploy emergency powers of enormous scope — and that a significant proportion of the population would comply, would indeed demand compliance from others, and would treat any objection as evidence of ignorance or moral failure. This knowledge has not been forgotten by those who govern. The infrastructure of surveillance, the habits of compliance, the willingness of tech platforms to enforce government narratives — none of these have been dismantled.
The next crisis is coming. It may be another pandemic — real or manufactured. It may be a climate emergency. It may be an economic crisis, a security threat, or something not yet anticipated. The template has been established. The compliance apparatus has been tested and found effective. And those who govern — whether by malice, by genuine emergency belief, or by opportunism — now know what is possible when the public is frightened enough.
A Word to the Lord’s People
It is appropriate to speak directly to the Lord’s people about what happened and what it means.
Many of God’s people were deceived during the pandemic, not because they are foolish, but because they are trusting. They trusted their governments to act in their best interests. They trusted their pastors to exercise discernment on their behalf. They trusted the medical authorities to tell them the truth. That trust was, in many cases, misplaced — not because everyone who participated in the management of the pandemic was dishonest, but because a system that incentivises compliance and punishes dissent cannot produce honest advice. The individual doctor, the individual official, the individual pastor who wanted to say something different faced enormous social and professional pressure not to do so. And many did not.
The lesson is not that Christians should be reflexively suspicious of all authority. Romans 13 is still in the Bible. We are to be subject to governing authorities and to pray for kings and all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty (1 Tim 2:1–2). But submission to governing authority does not mean surrendering the faculty of critical thought, and it does not mean obeying commands that violate the law of God. The early church did not stop meeting because the Roman authorities had concerns about public gatherings. The Reformation did not happen because Luther and his colleagues deferred to the religious authorities of their day. The Baptist tradition — which has always maintained that Christ alone is the head of His church and that no civil or ecclesiastical power has authority over the gathered body of believers — has a particular obligation to exercise discernment.
Ask the questions. Isolating the sick rather than locking down the healthy was not a fringe medical opinion — it was the standard practice of epidemic management for centuries. A six-foot social distancing rule that a senior health official later admitted had no scientific basis should have been met with the question: what is the evidence for this? The claim that the virus could not have come from a laboratory should have been met with: why not, and who says so, and what are their interests? The proposition that a vaccine that did not prevent transmission should be mandated as a condition of employment should have been met with: on what principle, and who authorised this?
These are not the questions of conspiracy theorists. They are the questions of responsible citizens and of Christians who understand that the governments of this world are not the government of God, that even well-intentioned rulers can be wrong, and that poorly-intentioned rulers can do enormous harm when they encounter a frightened and compliant population.
We pray for governments — genuinely, and without irony — that they would do right, that God would restrain the wickedness of those in power, and that His people would be given the wisdom to discern truth from falsehood in the next crisis, as they were not always given in this one. God is sovereign. The kingdoms of this world do not surprise Him. And the gates of hell — including the gates of totalitarian health policy — have not and will not prevail against the church that Jesus Christ is building.