Nicolas Hulscher was a graduate student at the University of Michigan School of Public Health when he emailed every professor in the department looking for an internship sponsor. Every one of them said no, or said nothing at all. So he emailed Dr. Peter McCullough instead — and got a response in five minutes, with a research project attached.
That project became a systematic review of autopsy findings in deaths following COVID-19 vaccination. He tells us he was warned by faculty that continuing the work would end his career before it started. He continued anyway.
He joins me from the McCullough Foundation in Dallas for a wide-ranging conversation about what happened next — and about the research he’s put out since.
What we cover:
The internship nobody would sponsor. How a cold email to Peter McCullough turned into a published systematic review, and what it was like presenting that work inside one of America’s most prominent public health schools.
Retracted, then republished. Hulscher says the paper became the most-accessed research article in the world before Forensic Science International pulled it — a retraction he argues violated COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines. He describes resubmitting it, passing peer review a second time, and seeing it published in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law. He also walks through the fact-check pieces and profiles written about him since.
The Fauci hearing. His read on the Senate testimony, the repeated invocations of the Fifth Amendment, the questioning around early-treatment suppression and gain-of-function funding — and his concern that a single prosecution becomes a way to close the books on everyone else.
The mRNA flu shot. The FDA has approved Moderna’s mRNA influenza product for adults over 50. Hulscher says he went through the FDA briefing documents and argues the reaction data and the absence of a placebo-controlled arm should have stopped it. We talk about what that means for the promise of placebo-controlled trials for new vaccines.
RFK Jr. vs. the machine. Is the Health Secretary being overruled, or is he going along? Hulscher gives his honest read.
Why he says the problem is the platform, not the payload. His explanation of lipid nanoparticle biodistribution, spike protein persistence, and why he frames much of the resulting injury as autoimmune in character.
AI-designed pathogens. A story he broke days before we recorded: researchers used AI sequence-generation models to design 16 synthetic bacteriophages not found in nature — and produced viable, replicating organisms. Hulscher went looking at the funding and found the Gates Foundation. His argument is that the threshold has now been crossed, and the capability doesn’t stay in friendly hands.
The sun. We close on something near to my heart: the modern fear of sunlight. Hulscher makes the case for full-spectrum exposure, vitamin D, and mitochondrial function — and points to research he says shows sunscreen users facing higher rates of major skin cancers, plus benzene contamination found in a fifth of products tested.
Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, is an epidemiologist and administrator at the McCullough Foundation. He holds a Master of Public Health in epidemiology from the University of Michigan and has contributed to more than thirty published studies. Find him at nicolashulscher.com, on X at @NicHulscher, and at thefocalpoints.com.
The views expressed by guests on Unscrew the News are their own. Nothing in this episode is medical advice — talk to a physician about your own health decisions.
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