One Take-Away From the Fauci Senate Hearing: “Deception” Author Senator Rand Paul Had it Right All Along

Sen. Rand Paul, Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, has a well-deserved moment in the spotlight as Anthony Fauci hid behind the 5th Amendment

Despite the lack of answers from Anthony Fauci during Wednesday’s hearing, Senator Paul’s questions got massive airtime in front of millions of Americans watching and listening.

That itself was a huge victory long in the making.

During the pandemic, Sen. Paul, like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scrutinized Fauci’s decision making and his role in funding gain-of-function research, which resulted in the 2023 book, Deception: The Great Cover-up.

Many in the legacy media ignored the book. Now it’s clear it was prescient.

“Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally while privately, he was well aware of a mountain of evidence suggesting the virus originated in the lab,” said Sen. Rand Paul toward the start of Wednesday’s hearing with Fauci, organized by the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

“The American people deserve answers,” Paul continued. “The American people deserve to know why dangerous research was funded by NIAID in a totalitarian country. In a lab that lacked acceptable safety standards. The decision to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, will likely go down in history as perhaps one of the worst public health decisions. Frankly, the American people deserve an apology.”

But Fauci had no answers. He stuck to a well-rehearsed script crafted by his legal team: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci said 111 times, including every time Paul asked a question.

“It is secrecy that destroys trust,” said Paul .“It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy. Trust can’t be ordered, it has to be earned. No scientist is above scrutiny, no government official is beyond accountability, and no public servant has the right to treat the suffering of millions of Americans as a footnote to his preferred version of history.”

Senator Paul was on to Anthony Fauci from the start. Wielding unimaginable power as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, Fauci had misled the country about the origins of the Covid pandemic and shut down scientific dissent.

When he appeared before a Senate committee in July of 2021, and Sen. Paul challenged him on his refusal to acknowledge that the experiments he’d funded were in fact gain-of-function and thus a violation of federal policy, reminding him that it’s a crime to lie to Congress, Fauci snapped. “If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you!”

It was a shocking breach of decorum – for a witness to verbally attack a U.S. Senator in a hearing – and showed Americans how arrogant this longtime bureaucrat who sat atop the nation’s public health bureaucracy had become.

Sen. Paul recently released a huge trove of documents to the public in a ‘Reading Room’ on his website. Among them are over 1,000 entries from Fauci’s diary – a daily record of Fauci’s media appearances and his participation in meetings of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and briefing members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

They reveal a man excited by the start of the pandemic in 2020, who relished the attention he was getting. “Amazing day!” he wrote in the entries for several days in January and February of 2020 as the new virus began to spread from Wuhan to Europe, and then the West Coast of the U.S., with people falling ill and dying often within days.

As demonstrated by the thoroughness of his book, Sen. Paul has been relentless in his drive to get to the truth of where SARS-CoV-2 came from and who funded its creation, and to force those involved, including Fauci, to come clean.

To Fauci it may seem like an obsession, but to many Americans, it’s the all-important search for the truth.

In the pursuit of the truth of the origins of the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, Sen. Paul subpoenaed Fauci to testify before his committee. It was uncertain whether Fauci would comply with the subpoena and appear on Capitol Hill, three and a half years after retiring from the federal government.

He did appear, with a bevy of lawyers. But after an opening statement in which he accused the chairman of unjustly pursuing him, he claimed a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and refused to answer any of the questions that were posed to him, by Rand and other committee members.

In his closing statement, Sen. Paul played a video featuring Fauci repeatedly saying in media appearances that the virus had come from the wet market in Wuhan, when privately, in his diary, Fauci wrote that he knew it hadn’t come from there. He also criticized Fauci’s dismissal of natural immunity, a phenomenon known to humanity for thousands of years, from the time of the Athenian Plague. And he told Fauci that he wished he would have sought effective treatments for Covid-like steroids, which resulted in a 37 percent reduction in death.

“I would have been willing to accept an apology today,” Sen. Paul told Fauci.

But there was no apology from Fauci. Just silence.

[Deception: The Great Cover-up, by Rand Paul, was published by Regnery, a division of Skyhorse, in 2023. It’s available through MAHA Action, here.]

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