Shockwaves rippled across the nation last week as the Department of Justice unexpectedly dropped its high-profile case against a Utah doctor accused of falsifying Covid vaccine records, and discarding thousands of doses at the height of the pandemic.
Dr. Kirk Moore, a plastic surgeon who faced up to 35 years in prison if convicted, was abruptly cleared of all charges just as his trial was getting underway in a Salt Lake City courtroom.
In a stunning reversal, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi herself ordered the case dismissed, bringing to a close two and a half years of relentless federal prosecution.
Following the attorney general’s directive, U.S. Attorney for Utah Felice Viti immediately filed a motion to dismiss the case and a stunned and grateful Dr. Moore walked free.
Explaining her move, Bondi noted online that Dr. Moore “gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so. He did not deserve the years in prison he was facing. It will end today.”
Agents with the U.S. Department of HHS alleged that by withholding the vaccines from minors at the request of parents, and injecting them with saline (salt water) instead, Moore was guilty of fraud and had “endangered others’ health.”
Dr. Moore contended that vaccines did not prevent Covid infection or transmission. He said he felt his foremost duty was to his patients, who had turned to him for help in shielding their children from the Covid vaccine. He added that he believed his actions had spared many of them from potential injury or death.
Congressmen Step Up
Bondi acknowledged the role that two congressmen had played in her decision to dismiss the case, hinting that crucial information about the case had not reached her earlier.
“This would not have been possible without Rep. MTG (Marjorie Taylor Greene), who brought this case to my attention. She has been a warrior for Dr. Moore and for ending the weaponization of government,” Bondi wrote in a subsequent post.
Greene announced last week that she had written a letter to the Department of Justice, asking that all charges against Moore be dropped. “This man is a hero, not a criminal,” she posted online.
Bondi also thanked Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah for enlightening her about key facts in the federal prosecution of Moore that she said reflected the weaponization of government against dissent, a practice “that had been honed during the Biden administration.”
“Dr. Kirk Moore stood up in the face of enormous pressure to fight against government overreach. I am grateful that the Attorney General was willing to help Dr. Moore maintain his freedom,” Sen. Lee said in a statement.
A few months earlier, when legal prospects for Moore looked bleak, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy had posted his support for the Utah surgeon, saying “Dr. Moore deserves a medal for his courage and his commitment to healing!”
With the trial looming, supporters had organized a rally in front of the Salt Lake City courthouse. One of the speakers, Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, threw his support behind Dr. Moore, reminding the assembled of the injustices they suffered throughout the pandemic and calling the charges a case of “federal overreach.”
“The way those who stood up and pushed back against vaccine mandates were treated, was wrong. We were treated like second-class citizens if we didn’t get the shot,” Schultz told the crowd. “Think about it for just a minute. You had to have a vaccine passport to walk down the streets and go into a shop, to go to a Jazz game, to go to a restaurant. To keep your job. To stay in school. That was unbelievable.”
“Dr. Moore was on the right side of all this, and we appreciate him standing up,” Schultz said.
Legal experts say the federal government’s dismissal of this case could set a precedent for how federal authorities handle similar cases moving forward.
Ending Covid Tyranny
During his presidential campaign, Trump had vowed that if elected, he would end what he called “Covid tyranny,” and the policy of using government agencies to carry out retaliatory and punitive actions against political adversaries.
One of the first executive orders he signed after his Inauguration was an order titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”
Based on that directive, AG Pam Bondi established the Weaponization Working Group (WWG) with the mandate to put an end to the “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power which the Biden administration used to upend the democratic process.”
The executive order details numerous forms of harassment utilized by the previous administration against its political foes in the form of long-running investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related tactics, pledging to put an end to these excesses.
Attorney General Bondi’s decision to drop the case against Dr. Moore marks a striking shift in federal policy toward those who resisted Covid-19 mandates. It signals a sharp departure from Biden-era practices that critics say weaponized federal authority against medical professionals who dared to dissent.
“The attorney general’s decision to dismiss the charges before the trial concluded reflects what the evidence has shown all along: our client did not commit a crime,” Moore’s attorney Kathryn Nester told reporters at a news conference following the attorney general’s announcement.
“Dr. Moore honored the personal medical decisions of his patients,” Nester said. “He never received a dollar in return. And, no unexpired vaccines were destroyed.”
My father didn’t just take the Hippocratic Oath,” Moore’s son told supporters at a rally prior to the trial’s outset. “He lived it every day. He fought to protect his patients, to heal the sick and to speak up when others stayed silent.”
“He didn’t allow himself to look the other way. He chose conscience over comfort.
“Now this same protector is being threatened with 35 years in prison. Not because he hurt anyone, but because he refused to let others be hurt.
“The government can try to silence him but you can never erase what he’s done for his patients, for his country and for his family.”
Moral Dilemma
Moore’s saga strikes at the heart of a profound moral dilemma: what happens when a fundamentally honest person feels compelled to lie to protect others from harm? Should loyalty to truth take precedence—or does a higher moral duty override it?
“Filling out (the cards) with false information was dishonest, it surely was, but it wasn’t a federal crime,” Nester said.
Moore said he grappled with the moral implications of his decision. It began when his medical clinic was shut down during the Covid lockdowns in 2021, and he turned his attention to treating patients who fell ill with the Covid-19 virus.
He began to avidly follow the work of a small group of physicians in various parts of the country who recommended early treatment for the disease to prevent hospitalization and death.
These doctors, including the late Dr. Zev Zelenko of Monsey, NY, renowned pulmonologist Dr. Pierre Kory, critical care specialist Dr. Paul Marik, leading cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough and others were using re-purposed drugs to save lives.
Their protocols in treating Covid included hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, zinc, steroids, vitamin C and monoclonal antibody infusion, vitamin D, azithromycin and other compounds. Their efforts saw remarkable success, although they conflicted with the medical advice of the federal bureaucracy led by NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci and the heads of the CDC and FDA.
These public health experts denigrated the notion of early treatment for the virus, saying that no protocol could be trusted unless it had passed rigorous gold-standard, double-blinded clinical studies.
The only recourse, the nation’s medical experts advised, was to sweat it out or to wait until the disease was so advanced the patient couldn’t breathe and would then be admitted to the hospital.
‘Not a Single Death’
For Dr. Moore, witnessing the lifesaving benefit of early treatment for close to one thousand Covid patients he treated from Oct 2021-Oct. 2022 removed all doubts about what he was doing.
“I didn’t have a single death,” he noted in an appearance on a conservative podcast.
Then came the vaccine rollout in December 2021, followed by vaccine mandates and passports that aimed for universal vaccination. Moore shared the initial excitement for a vaccine that would wipe out Covid-19. With his plastic surgery clinic still shuttered, he opened a vaccine clinic and was soon admitting people of all ages.
At some point, as reports on the government vaccine monitoring website VAERS began trickling in, he became concerned. “700 deaths were reported in the first few months post-vaccination from different parts of the country…. It was quite alarming.”
“They kept lowering the age for vaccine mandates. First it was people over 65, then it was lowered to 50… eventually all the way down to age 12 and above,” reflected Moore. “But children were not getting sick and dying from Covid, so why were they being included in the mandates? Something was off.”
Parents Wanted to Shield Children
Moore began encountering parents who confessed they didn’t want their child vaccinated but were afraid they would face social ostracizing for not taking the shot.
“The pressure campaign to get vaccinated was so powerful at that time that parents were at a loss. They wanted to give their kids fake jabs so they wouldn’t seek out the Covid vax at school or elsewhere, without parental consent. They came to me for help,” Moore explained in an interview.
He and some parents came up with the idea to inject the children with saline instead of a vaccine dose originated. Assuming they were vaccinated like all their peers, the children would no longer be socially isolated but could take part in sports programs, go to bowling alleys, eat out in restaurants with their friends and participate in normal social interactions.
Soon he was being sought out by adults seeking a vaccine card for themselves without having to take the jab, so they wouldn’t lose their jobs or be expelled from their schools.
Moore gave the cards out at no charge, merely suggesting a charitable donation to an organization devoted to advancing medical freedom.
When asked about his decisions, Moore said he went with what his gut was telling him.
“I just did what was I felt was right. I talked to my patients about full informed consent. I opened the insert that came with each vaccine shipment, and showed them a folded sheet of paper that was empty except for three words: “Left intentionally blank.”
“I’ve been a practicing doctor for over twenty years,” Moore said. “Before I do a procedure I go over all the details with the patient, what’s in the treatment, possible allergens and toxicities, most common side effects, least common ones. You can’t have informed consent with people when neither one of you know what you’re injecting in them.”
“I didn’t take payment from a single Covid case,” he remarked in a podcast interview. Even the prosecutors who scraped the bottom of the barrel to find crimes to charge him with, did not contradict that assertion.
Caught in a Sting Operation
Following a sting operation in late 2022 and a joint investigation by DHS, HHS and the FBI, Moore was indicted by a federal grand jury in January 2023, together with his medical corporation and three co-defendants.
According to the 2023 federal indictment, Moore and his co-defendants faced up to 35 years in prison on charges including “conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to convert government property,” and “tampering with evidence.”
Even after Trump assumed office and installed new senior managements in these powerful agencies, much of the lower level infrastructure continues to be run by holdovers from the Obama and Biden eras.
Career bureaucrats in the DOJ, for example, appear to still determine which cases will be pursued and how they will be conducted, even when their policies may conflict with President Trump’s agenda.
This dichotomy was on display in the Moore case.
Moore’s attorneys had petitioned the DOJ under Pam Bondi to dismiss the case almost as soon as she took office, hoping that President Trump’s vow to end “Covid tyranny” would extend to setting Dr. Moore free.
But the Justice Department had declined, saying it did not “intend to intervene in this matter.”
According to court transcripts, Judge Howard Nielson seemed to have a premonition that the case would nonetheless be dismissed before its conclusion. He questioned lead prosecutor Todd Bouton as to whether the U.S. government wanted to proceed with the trial, if it was at all likely that the trial itself would be halted and all charges dropped due to intervention from the DOJ.
Bouton stated that not only is the case proceeding, but he had received approval from the top level of the Department of Justice to move forward with the prosecution, because no dismissal was imminent.
To everyone’s shock (except perhaps Judge Nielson), the case was dismissed a few days later.
Was it Bondi who had changed her mind?
Or was the earlier DOJ decision declining to intervene in the Moore case issued not by Bondi but by subordinates in her name but without her direct knowledge?
Prosecutors Tried to Speed up Moore Trial Before Trump Took Office
Support for this option comes from a letter written by one of Dr. Moore’s attorneys, David Drake, to Attorney General Bondi, urging her to intervene and warning that political motives—rather than a genuine pursuit of justice—appeared to be driving the case.
Drake pointed to a striking example: prosecutors had attempted to move Dr. Moore’s trial up by a full six months, seemingly to ensure it occurred before President Trump could take office.
“Dr. Moore’s trial was set in July of 2025,” Drake wrote to AG Bondi. “On November 22, 2024, the government filed a Demand for a Speedy Trial, requesting a trial date of January 13, 2025. The political significance of these dates, falling after the election and before the inauguration, is undeniable,” the letter reads.
“We believe that this ongoing prosecution appears to have been designed to achieve political objectives, rather than pursue justice,” Drake emphasized.
The letter goes on to describe the prosecution’s request to place the tightest possible restrictions on the defense’s ability to establish their client’s innocence, by placing several crucial subjects in Limine (outside the bounds of permitted questioning and cross-examination).
Prosecutors wanted Judge Nielson to exclude at trial all mention of alleged misconduct on the part of the CDC and HHS under the Biden administration, and to ban all questions and comments about Covid vaccine efficacy.
Preventing Dr. Moore from defending his stance on medical freedom—undermined by the government’s vaccine mandates—and from presenting growing evidence of vaccine harm and ineffectiveness, would have severely crippled his ability to mount a meaningful defense.
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Solitary Confinement
In a separate letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi and HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Dr. Moore’s attorney, Brian Barnhill, outlined the selectively harsh and punitive treatment his client endured from the outset of the prosecution.
In January 2023, eleven law enforcement agents from DHS and HHS stormed Dr. Moore’s office to arrest him. Although initially released, he was later re-arrested and jailed for 22 days—confined to isolation for 22 hours each day—for merely attempting to share essential court-related information with co-defendants, an act prosecutors labeled a “pre-trial violation.”
His board certification was revoked and hospital privileges were rescinded. His medical clinic all but collapsed—while mounting legal fees drained his assets and left him on the brink of financial ruin.
“To put this in context,” his attorney wrote to Bondi, “the United States is seeking to punish Dr. Moore for honoring his Hippocratic Oath. He harmed no one, has long put his patients’ well-being before his own, and is the only doctor being prosecuted by the government for his alleged actions on his patients’ behalf.”
The letter went on to emphasize that the government itself acknowledged that Moore “did not seek or receive any monetary gain for the vaccine cards,” but continues “to prosecute him for offenses carrying maximum sentences of 35 years.”
“Under these circumstances,” the letter concluded, “it is a reasonable request that Dr. Moore’s case be presented for consideration for a presidential pardon.”
As trial proceedings went ahead, Moore’s legal team had all but given up hope for a timely response when news of the case’s dismissal broke.
