This tech millionaire went from covid trial funder to misinformation superspreader

In the midst of the pandemic frenzy, as billions flooded into the race for vaccines, Silicon Valley mogul Steve Kirsch did what he does best: he backed the underdog.

Having already struck it rich as the founder of Infoseek, a search engine that was once the Google of its time, Kirsch has poured millions into tackling the world’s most pressing issues. His unconventional approach? Betting on the untested and the unexpected—from funding asteroid detection to championing nuclear power to save the planet.

By March 2020, he set his sights on an audacious new mission: finding covid treatments hidden within existing medications. With vaccines still years away, Kirsch believed the key to quick, life-saving solutions could lie in repurposing safe, approved drugs—no waiting for lengthy trials.

With government funding scarce, Steve Kirsch took matters into his own hands, founding the Covid-19 Early Treatment Fund (CETF) with a $1 million investment of his own money. He quickly garnered support from Silicon Valley heavyweights, with Marc Benioff and Elon Musk’s foundations listed as donors on the CETF website. In just 18 months, the fund has granted over $4.5 million to researchers investigating the potential of FDA-approved drugs in the fight against COVID-19.

The fund has produced one hopeful result: the antidepressant fluvoxamine. However, many of the CETF-funded efforts have fallen short—a reality familiar to researchers, as most drug trials end in failure.

What’s been more troubling, though, is Kirsch's reaction to both the successes and failures of the work he’s funded. For example, after a hydroxychloroquine trial failed to show any benefit for treating COVID-19, Kirsch refused to accept the results, blaming poor study design and statistical errors.

He has also fiercely criticized what he perceives as a campaign against drugs like fluvoxamine and ivermectin. Three members of CETF’s scientific advisory board even claim that he pressured them to promote fluvoxamine for clinical use without conclusive evidence it worked for COVID-19.

In recent months, Kirsch has taken increasingly extreme positions on COVID-19 vaccines, calling them "toxic" and alleging that mRNA vaccines have killed one in 1,000 people who’ve received them. He even went so far as to declare that vaccines “kill more people than they save” at an FDA public forum, a claim first reported by the Daily Beast.

As Kirsch’s views became more anti-vaccine, many of his professional colleagues began distancing themselves. In May, all 12 members of CETF’s scientific advisory board resigned, citing his dangerous claims and erratic behavior. Later, the conflict spread to his latest startup, M10, where the board told him he would have to stop publicly denouncing vaccines if he wanted to stay. In September, he resigned as CEO and relinquished his board seat.

So how did a man once focused on advancing science become a source of misinformation that undermines the very research he funded?

A Strong Start

Steve Kirsch made all the right moves when founding CETF. To evaluate proposals, he assembled a star-studded advisory board, including renowned drug researcher Robert Siliciano from Johns Hopkins, along with leading biologists, drug developers, and clinical researchers. The fund operated under the nonprofit status of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which managed its finances until it withdrew, according to the Daily Beast. (Note: this organization is not connected to the Rockefeller Foundation, which supports Technology Review’s COVID-19 reporting.)

While Kirsch had the final say on grant decisions, everyone I spoke to expressed confidence in the process and the projects that were funded.

"I agreed to join because I have such high respect for Bob [Siliciano] and thought the concept was excellent," said Doug Richman, a prominent HIV drug researcher at the University of California San Diego and former member of CETF’s scientific advisory board. "We did thorough reviews of research proposals."

One of the first grants went to test the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19. David Boulware, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, received $125,000 for the project. The results of this trial would eventually set Kirsch on a collision course with the scientific community.

"Steve Kirsch was incredibly helpful at the start of the pandemic, stepping in to fund early treatment trials when the US government wouldn't support such studies," Boulware told me via email.

Hydroxychloroquine was widely prescribed as a COVID-19 treatment throughout 2020, fueled by anecdotes and flawed studies. Boulware’s trial was part of a broader effort to strengthen the evidence behind standard COVID treatments, and it was one of several trials that found no benefit to using the drug.

However, the confusion surrounding hydroxychloroquine became a breeding ground for skeptics. In fact, many of the leading figures who now spread misinformation about ivermectin and vaccines initially gained attention by promoting hydroxychloroquine—including by attempting to "debunk" Boulware’s data analysis.

Despite having direct access to the trial leader, Kirsch eventually became convinced that a "correct" interpretation of the data would show hydroxychloroquine was effective.

Boulware disagrees, stating that while Kirsch’s funding was crucial, his views on drugs and vaccines have been problematic. “I disagree with his interpretation of the data on several medications and strongly oppose his anti-vaccine rhetoric,” Boulware told me in an email.

Though Boulware declined an interview, he was recently featured in a Mother Jones article discussing the harassment he’s faced over his research on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

A few months ago, Kirsch abruptly stopped promoting hydroxychloroquine, even removing it from the CETF’s official list of funded trials. On his personal website, he explained that he had been advised that continuing to support the drug “would immediately trash my credibility.”

A More Promising Candidate

One of CETF's grants, however, led to much more promising results. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis reached out to Kirsch for $67,000 to complete a small—but placebo-controlled—trial. They were testing the antidepressant fluvoxamine on COVID-19 patients, hoping to prevent the runaway immune response that causes severe symptoms.

In October, the team reported that while some patients in the placebo group were hospitalized, none of the fluvoxamine-treated patients required hospitalization.

In November, CETF awarded the team an additional $500,000 for a Phase 3 clinical trial to potentially confirm the drug’s effectiveness. That trial has since been completed, and the researchers are currently analyzing the data. Several other trials around the world are also in the final stages.

But the progress was too slow for Kirsch. As soon as the results of the first fluvoxamine trial were released—before they had even been peer-reviewed—he published a post on Medium titled, "The Fast, Easy, Safe, Simple, Low-Cost Solution to COVID That Works 100% of the Time That Nobody Wants to Talk About."

Medium banned him for spreading misinformation. “Medium revoked my account for life. My crime? Telling the truth,” he tweeted. “Be warned!”

Since then, he has continued to promote fluvoxamine, along with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. When I asked why so many experts disagreed with him, he claimed there were efforts—either malicious or negligent—to suppress evidence of inexpensive, effective COVID treatments.

“[NIH] doesn’t want any of these treatments. That’s why they didn’t even fund the fluvoxamine trial,” he told me. He argued that the government prefers to fund and promote new, proprietary drugs and vaccines.

In response, the fluvoxamine investigators denied any effort to suppress their research and expressed cautious optimism about their ongoing study. One of them, Eric Lenze, was even scheduled to present their fluvoxamine findings to the National Institutes of Health the next day. Both researchers urged readers to get vaccinated.

“Although there is evidence that fluvoxamine can prevent clinical worsening and hospitalization in outpatients with early COVID-19, I have seen no solid evidence that fluvoxamine can replace vaccines,” co-investigator Angela Reiersen told me in an email.

“I got tired of arguing”

Kirsch is a serial entrepreneur who has spent decades pitching the next big thing, from optical mice (Mouse Systems) and document processing (FrameMaker) to search engines (Infoseek), digital security (OneID), and e-commerce (Propel Software). His latest venture, M10, is a blockchain startup for banks, a spin-off of a spin-off. While he's made millions from these ventures, none of them have turned him into a household name.

“You see this with people who have a lot of money, who think it proves their intelligence,” Richman told me. “He sees himself as an expert in areas where he lacks the training or experience, and he’s not following scientific methods to evaluate data.”

As trial results came in, the growing disconnect began to strain Kirsch’s relationship with the fund’s advisory board. Several former members told me that he began pressuring them relentlessly to promote fluvoxamine in media stories, often through exhausting and circular conversations.

“After one or two conversations like that, I got tired of arguing, so I started avoiding his calls.”

- Judith Feinberg, West Virginia University and former member of CETF's scientific advisory board

“Steve wanted to say, ‘Look, I’ve got all these renowned infectious disease doctors and researchers, and they all say fluvoxamine should be given a chance,’” Judith Feinberg, a former CETF advisory board member and vice chair of research at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, told me. With extensive experience in complex, politicized pandemics—having been one of the first clinicians to specialize in HIV/AIDS and serving on the FDA advisory panel that approved the first antiretroviral drug—she has seen her fair share of high-stakes medical debates.

But even she grew weary of Kirsch’s constant efforts to dismiss the data. “After one or two conversations like that, I got tired of arguing, so I started avoiding his calls,” she said.

For scientists, giving fluvoxamine a chance means conducting a large, controlled trial—not administering it off-label to individual patients outside the context of active data collection and analysis. The board members I spoke with said they refused to publicly endorse any drugs for off-label use and tried to explain to Kirsch that it's common for promising results from small trials to fade in larger ones.

Peter Meinke, another former board member, spent nearly three decades in drug discovery at Merck.

“It’s incredibly common for a small effect, something that seems promising, to turn out to be a statistical fluke when you look at a larger population. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true,” he told me. “With covid, 80% of patients do just fine with no treatment—just a bit of bed rest and fluids. It’s actually much harder to identify a clear signal than when treating conditions like diabetes or cancer.”

Beyond the issues with fluvoxamine, the advisors grew increasingly uneasy with Kirsch’s frequent claims about ivermectin. He has repeatedly asserted in blog posts and alternative media appearances that it, when combined with fluvoxamine, can prevent 100% of covid-19 deaths. (“The ivermectin data is garbage,” Feinberg said. “There’s nothing there.”)

The situation took a sharp turn for the worse when Kirsch began claiming that the government was covering up vaccine-related deaths.

At the end of May this year, Siliciano emailed the other advisors, stating that Kirsch had “gone off the deep end” and that he was severing ties. The rest of the board quickly followed suit. (Siliciano declined to comment for this article.)

Debating Kirsch can be exhausting. He often comes across as brash and interruptive, weaving dire warnings about vaccines with subtle insinuations about Anthony Fauci and vague references to influential people who supposedly agree with him privately but cannot speak out publicly.

In three phone conversations and dozens of emails, his responses to questions about the claims in this story were often imprecise or inconsistent. He told me that while he and his family were vaccinated as soon as they were eligible, he became convinced vaccines were dangerous after hearing from a man he hired to clean his carpets, who became seriously ill after receiving the vaccine. At other times, he has stated that he began questioning vaccine safety after an unnamed Twitter follower told him several family members died following their shots. Recently, he has raised the number of Americans he claims have been killed by the vaccine from 25,000 to 150,000, and even “as many as 250,000.”

Jeffrey Morris, director of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, has made it a point to debunk Kirsch’s claims. On his blog, *Covid-19 Data Science*, Morris has thoroughly—yet relentlessly—dissected the “evidence” Kirsch uses to back his vaccine death claims.

In a recent post, discussing Kirsch's remarks during a three-minute comment at an FDA public forum, Morris wrote:

“Despite numerous pages of writing and claims of over a dozen ‘independent analyses’ confirming their results, the evidence falls far short of supporting these dramatic conclusions, including the claim that vaccines have caused over 250,000 excess deaths in the USA.”

While Morris agrees that all claims about vaccine safety should be carefully examined—"Is it possible there’s another rare side effect of the vaccines that we haven’t figured out yet? Yeah, it’s possible," he told me—he also argues that Kirsch often manipulates evidence to make it appear to support baseless claims. In fact, Morris was unintentionally the source for one of Kirsch's figures.

In September, Kirsch emailed Morris asking him to estimate the maximum number of deaths caused by vaccines. “Who knows,” Morris responded. “But not 150K. And not zero.”

Kirsch quickly forwarded the exchange to me and, I suspect, other journalists. "BOMBSHELL: Top biostats professor admits we have NO CLUE # of people KILLED by COVID vaccines," he wrote. "He thinks # killed by vax could be anywhere between 0 and 150K people dead."

Those who know Kirsch say this is a common tactic. He’s skilled at debate, quickly shifting the conversation's premise to put others on the defensive.

“He may not be a good scientist, but he’s smart,” says Feinberg from WVU. “He’s very convincing. He might be a good snake oil salesman.”

I experienced this firsthand during a call where we discussed several studies. Kirsch told me, "Meta-analyses are a higher level of evidence than randomized controlled trials." When I responded that meta-analyses are only as reliable as the data they’re based on, he replied, "I’d like to understand your source on that, because I can’t find a source that says a phase 3 trial is greater evidence than a meta-analysis."

“When you characterize me, you need to say that Steve Kirsch doesn't go with majority votes on interpreting data.”

- Steve Kirsch

While a meta-analysis, which combines the results of several well-conducted trials, can strengthen an argument or reveal patterns that may not be visible in smaller samples, it’s essentially just the sum of its parts. Any single well-executed experiment is more valuable than merging the results of multiple flawed ones. Still, in the moment, his question caught me off guard, and I stumbled.

However, perhaps Kirsch’s most effective tactic is his sheer persistence. During our first conversation, which stretched into a multi-hour Zoom session, he paced through the rooms of his expansive house, phone held at chest level, rarely glancing at the camera. Thirty minutes after our scheduled time ended, he dropped his phone into the cupholder of his Tesla to continue talking while running an errand.

“When you describe me, make sure you say that Steve Kirsch doesn’t follow the majority on data interpretation,” he told me when I asked about his views on ivermectin, which he insists is a silver bullet against COVID. “If you want to find someone to debate me for ten thousand dollars, or a thousand dollars, I’m happy to do that, just for your benefit.”

Eventually, David Satterfield, a press representative who had been listening in, unmuted his microphone to suggest we wrap up the conversation by email. After I ended the Zoom meeting, Satterfield called to apologize for cutting us off. “I was just getting tired,” he said, before asking to speak off the record.

A Network of Influence

This would be less of an issue if Kirsch’s views on vaccines were kept private or only shared with a small group. However, as he’s clashed with the experts he initially worked with, Kirsch has increasingly aligned himself with others who share his vaccine views—who, in turn, have provided a large and receptive audience for his claims about a fluvoxamine conspiracy.

His appearance on Bret Weinstein’s DarkHorse podcast, a platform known for anti-covid-vaccine and pro-ivermectin views, alongside Robert Malone, a leading figure in vaccine misinformation, connected Kirsch to the "intellectual dark web" followers. This group has since embraced him as an ally in spreading their messages. Kirsch has also made multiple videos and podcasts with Vladimir Zelenko, the doctor behind the push for hydroxychloroquine, who played a key role in convincing Trump to promote the drug.

Although YouTube has removed the full video of the DarkHorse episode multiple times, various clips have accumulated over 4 million views, and the full audio remains accessible on Spotify.

“The claim that ‘the spike is toxic,’ that directly came from the DarkHorse episode. I see it all the time on social media,” Morris told me. He’s probably Kirsch’s closest adversary, frequently challenging his claims in blog posts and private emails with Kirsch and his supporters. “I didn’t intend to spend much time on Steve in particular, but that video had such a wide impact.”

In June, after the resignation of CETF’s advisory board, Kirsch appeared in a Facebook Live video with Zelenko and celebrity rehab coach Dr. Drew. During the session, he claimed that mRNA vaccines kill one in 5,000 recipients and significantly increase the rate of miscarriages.

There is no evidence to support either of these claims, as Morris has thoroughly documented. However, Kirsch often uses emotional appeals to compensate for the lack of data. On Dr. Drew, he shared a story about “a friend’s daughter” who supposedly had to get an abortion due to damage caused by the vaccine.

“The baby’s brain was split in half, and it was just covered with blood. It was so severe you couldn’t even see the baby’s body through all the blood,” Kirsch said. “They immediately ruled out the vaccine, because the vaccine is, quote, ‘safe.’”

Shortly after his DarkHorse podcast appearance, several partners from Kirsch’s latest startup, M10, began voicing concerns about the growing extremism of his vaccine views. “We asked Steve to tone it down. It was not compatible with his position as CEO to continue taking such a public stance on the vaccines,” Richard Char, M10’s general counsel, told me.

“He is very smart, and knows that he is very smart, and sometimes he behaves like he thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, whether he is or isn't.”

- Richard Char, M10

Kirsch responded by removing his name from articles he had written about vaccine deaths, changing the authorship to “VaccineTruth.”

On July 1, he tweeted from his personal account, “My publicly shared concerns regarding the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines may have had a negative impact on my company, M10. To protect M10 from my COVID-19 vaccination opinions, I will no longer post about my vaccination concerns here.”

He then created a new pseudonymous account, @VaccineTruth2, to continue spreading his messages. But even that didn’t last long. By early September, Kirsch had been replaced as CEO of M10 by his co-founder, Marten Nelson. He quickly tweeted an offer to pay anyone $1 million if they could win a debate with him about vaccine deaths.

“He felt like he had to speak out about covid, and so he made the decision to separate himself from M10,” said Char, who has known Kirsch since the 1980s.

He added that this was “completely in keeping with his personality.”

“He’s very smart, and he knows it. Sometimes he behaves like he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, whether he is or isn’t,” Char said.

Saving the world has been a recurring theme in Kirsch’s life. “There are two ways I’ve discovered that I may be able to save the world,” he told an IEEE Spectrum reporter in 2000. “One is to reduce the threat of nuclear war. The other is to identify an asteroid that’s going to hit the planet.”

His focus shifted to medical research in 2007 when he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. His foundation changed its mission to one goal—curing Steve Kirsch—by supporting one of the few scientists studying the disease. After several failed treatments, he created his own chemotherapy protocol and searched for an oncologist who would administer it. He has now outlived his initial prognosis by several years.

“He’s a genuinely good guy. I mean, he really, truly has a heart of gold,” Char said. “He’s spending his own money to do what he thinks is right. It’s motivated by his desire to keep people safe and advance healthcare.”

But Kirsch is also driven by a deep competitive urge. In the same IEEE Spectrum article about his then-new startup, Propel Software, he admitted that while he felt successful, he didn’t feel famous.

“Mouse Systems isn’t a household name,” he told the journalist. “We didn’t create better mouse technology than Microsoft. Infoseek had its chance to compete with Yahoo but didn’t grow. And FrameMaker remains a niche product. Sure, these were successes, but they could’ve been bigger if we had focused more on marketing. I’m not making that mistake again.”

“Now we’ve lost the high ground”

It’s not unusual to be cautious about emerging science, nor is it wrong to be skeptical of pharmaceutical companies. These massive corporations often prioritize profits over human health: in 2009, Pfizer paid a $2.3 billion settlement for kickbacks and fraudulent marketing, including a $1.3 billion felony fine.

In 2013, Johnson & Johnson paid $2.2 billion for its own kickback and fraud scandal, including a $400 million fine for its subsidiary Janssen, which manufactures the COVID vaccine. The U.S. government accused Janssen of improperly promoting the antipsychotic drug Risperdal to dementia patients, even though it increased the risk of death in the elderly. The man who led the Risperdal sales division, Alex Gorsky, is now the CEO of Johnson & Johnson.

As a healthcare journalist, I initially took a cautious approach to mRNA vaccines. However, after reviewing extensive data and information from pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and numerous independent trials worldwide, I now trust that they’re safe for most adults.

I also believe it’s essential to explore existing drugs that could help treat COVID symptoms. Over the next few years, millions of unvaccinated people will get COVID, and it’s crucial to mitigate their suffering and reduce pressure on the healthcare system.

But the best way to help people is through rigorous trials that demonstrate which drugs work for which people, at what doses, and under what conditions—not by creating entire treatment protocols based on limited evidence.

Unfortunately, as Jeffrey Morris from UPenn points out, public health officials and scientists have done plenty to undermine their own credibility. Claims about the ineffectiveness of masks, downplaying the immunity from previous COVID infections, and a lack of transparency around vaccine safety surveillance systems have all contributed to the erosion of trust.

“We didn’t want to fuel the anti-vaccine narrative, so we actively suppressed clear scientific data. Now, we’ve lost the high ground,” Morris told me.

And this is what has allowed figures like Kirsch to gain influence. It’s a cycle that fosters mistrust and elevates individuals who position themselves against official authorities.

“The collateral damage is that now, many people don’t trust scientific leaders or the scientific community. They’re turning to alternative leaders,” Morris said. “And that’s what creates these so-called heroes.”