Medicine, science, bioethics, homesteading, politics, and life
Who is Dr. Robert W. Malone? Why does my voice matter?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…
~ A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
I am a physician-scientist, bioethicist, and author whose career has spanned molecular biology, clinical research, vaccine development, biodefense, drug repurposing, and public health policy. My early research played a foundational role in the development of mRNA and DNA vaccination and non-viral gene-delivery technologies, including the concept of RNA as a drug. I hold numerous fundamental domestic and foreign patents in these fields and have published approximately 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
I received my medical degree from Northwestern University, completed the Harvard Medical School Global Clinical Scholars Research Training program, and trained at UC Davis, UC San Diego, and the Salk Institute. My career has taken me from laboratory research and biotechnology to academia, government advisory committees, and testimony before legislatures around the world.
But credentials only explain part of why I am here.
From the laboratory to the public square
The COVID era changed the direction of my life.
My initial concerns about the development, regulation, safety, and bioethics of the genetic COVID-19 vaccines quickly expanded to include regulatory capture, censorship of scientific debate, suppression of repurposed drugs, erosion of informed consent, and the increasingly close relationship among government, pharmaceutical companies, technology companies, academia, and corporate media.
I had spent much of my career believing that institutions such as the FDA, NIH, and CDC were fundamentally structured to protect the public interest. What I witnessed during COVID forced me to reconsider that assumption, and I spoke out.
That decision led to hundreds of interviews and podcasts and testimony or presentations before the United States Congress, the European Parliament, the United Kingdom Parliament, the Mexican and Italian Senates, the Japanese Parliament, and numerous state legislatures and governmental bodies.
But COVID was the catalyst, not the destination.
My work now addresses larger questions: how institutions exercise power, how politics and money can corrupt science, how regulatory capture undermines public trust, and how individuals, families, and communities can reclaim independence from increasingly centralized systems.
Building instead of merely criticizing
There is another side to this story that has become increasingly important to Jill and me: homesteading.
My wife and partner, Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD, and I have been together since high school. She has been involved in virtually every major professional endeavor of my adult life and is an accomplished scientist and writer in her own right. She frequently contributes to Malone News, often without a byline, and is deeply involved in the research, writing, publishing, farming, and business work that we do together.
We live on a working horse farm in Virginia that has gradually become our own version of “Galt’s Gulch.” We raise animals, grow food, manage land, plant trees, preserve food, build infrastructure, and continually learn skills that previous generations would have considered ordinary.
What began as a lifestyle choice became something more.
Homesteading taught us that decentralization is not merely a political concept. It can be practiced.
Growing some of your own food matters. Knowing your farmer matters. Understanding your land matters. Building practical skills matters. Producing rather than merely consuming matters. Strong marriages, families, neighbors, farms, local businesses, and communities create resilience that cannot be supplied by another government program or smartphone application.
That experience became the foundation for our book, Homesteading for Health, published in 2026. The book explores the connections among food, physical health, mental health, community, self-reliance, and the extraordinary benefits that can come from reconnecting everyday life with the natural world.
We do not advocate abandoning modern technology or modern medicine. Quite the opposite. We believe in using good science, useful technology, and modern medicine where they genuinely improve human life, while recovering the knowledge and independence that modern society has too often discarded.
What we write about now
Malone News has consequently grown far beyond COVID.
We write about medicine, public health, biotechnology, bioethics, government, regulatory capture, scientific integrity, agriculture, food systems, health and wellness, homesteading, farming, economics, culture, politics, marriage, community, and individual liberty.
Sometimes that means analyzing a scientific paper or government policy. Sometimes it means investigating what a federal agency would rather not discuss. Sometimes it means writing about growing chestnut trees, raising livestock, soil, pesticides, food preservation, horses, marriage, or what we have learned from building a farm.
These subjects may appear unrelated.
I increasingly believe they are not.
They all come back to a fairly simple question:
How do we build healthy, meaningful, independent lives in a world increasingly dominated by large institutions that seek to manage our health, information, food, finances, and choices?
Criticism alone is not enough. At some point, you have to build something better.
That is what Jill and I are trying to do.
Malone News
More than 355,000 people now subscribe to Malone News on Substack.
Free subscribers receive our public articles and updates. Paid subscribers receive access to additional research, analysis, essays, and subscriber discussions. Paid subscriptions also help support the research, writing, travel, public speaking, investigations, and advocacy work that we undertake.
Much of our public-policy and educational work is unpaid. Subscriber support gives us something increasingly rare in modern media and science: the ability to investigate and write about subjects without asking a corporation, university, pharmaceutical company, government agency, or advertiser for permission.
That independence matters.
If you find value in this work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber and joining us.
We have spent a great deal of time documenting what has gone wrong.
Increasingly, our work is about what comes next.
So, let’s get down to building it.
