[3][14] In 1990, he contributed to a paper with Jon A. Wolff, Dennis A. Carson, and others, which first suggested the possibility of synthesizing mRNA in a laboratory to trigger the production of a desired protein.
[3][16][17][18] While Malone promotes himself as an inventor of mRNA vaccines,[1][7] credit for the distinction is more often given to the lead authors on the major papers he contributed to (such as Felgner and Wolff), later advances by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman,[3][19] or Moderna co-founder Derrick Rossi.
[22] He was CEO and co-founder of Atheric Pharmaceutical,[23] which in 2016 was contracted by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases to assist in the development of a treatment for the Zika virus by evaluating the efficacy of existing drugs.
[7] In early 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Malone was involved in research through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's DOMANE program into the heartburn medicine famotidine (Pepcid) as a potential COVID-19 treatment.
[28][31] With another researcher, Malone successfully proposed to the publishers of Frontiers in Pharmacology a special issue featuring early observational studies on existing medication used in the treatment of COVID-19, for which they recruited other guest editors, contributors, and reviewers.
[31] The publisher rejected the ivermectin paper due to what it stated were "a series of strong, unsupported claims" which they determined did "not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution.
[7] In a July 2021 interview, Malone admitted to taking the Moderna vaccine, claiming that he did so due to suffering from long COVID, and because he and his wife needed to travel.
In particular, the video suggested that Jake West, a 17-year-old Indiana high school football player who succumbed to sudden cardiac arrest, had actually died from COVID-19 vaccination.
On December 30, 2021, Malone claimed on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast that "mass formation psychosis" was developing in American society in its reaction to COVID-19 just as during the rise of Nazi Germany.
[45][46] The term mass formation psychosis is not found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is not based on factual medical information, and is described by Steve Reicher, a professor of social psychology at the University of St Andrews, as "more metaphor than science, more ideology than fact.
[48][49] On January 3, 2022, Congressman Troy Nehls entered a full transcript[2][50] of The Joe Rogan Experience interview with Malone into the Congressional Record in order to circumvent what he said was censorship by social media.