This week’s Senate vote to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress was the final act in a six-year crusade by one U.S. senator to get to the truth of the Covid-19 virus — what it was, where it came from, and why the response of public health officials contradicted the known science about the virus.
That senator is Kentucky’s Dr. Rand Paul, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
In introducing Dr. Paul during the weekly MAHA Media Hub on Wednesday, MAHA Action president Tony Lyons referred to him as “our very own MAHA hero,” “a fighter for free speech” and a “warrior against corrupt science.” Lyons also praised him for his years-long mission to hold Fauci accountable for his actions.
“What he’s done with Fauci is such an epic moment,” Lyons said, “that we should celebrate because it was so hard to get here, because we had the most powerful health official in the world telling us lies every day.”
Sen. Paul’s fight to get to the truth about the origin of Covid-19 began six years ago when he was virtually alone among U.S. senators asking then NIAID director Fauci why he wasn’t talking about natural immunity, why he was urging that schools be closed when so few children had died from the virus or become seriously ill, and why he didn’t show more humility when it was clear that many of the early predictions about the new coronavirus had been wrong.
At a May 12, 2020 hearing where Fauci was testifying before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, then committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) said that testing and vaccines would be the key to re-opening the American economy.
It was Sen. Paul, a physician prior to being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, who turned the focus on something very different: Herd immunity.
The media, he told Fauci, was continuing to report that there was no evidence that patients who survived the new coronavirus had immunity.
“I think actually the truth is the opposite,” said Sen. Paul. “We have no evidence that survivors of coronavirus don’t have immunity, and a great deal of evidence that suggests that they do.”
Sen. Paul urged Fauci to clarify publicly what he’d told the committee – that in all likelihood, people recovering from Covid-19 did have natural immunity, and would not likely get the virus a second time.
At that hearing in the summer of 2020, Sen. Paul also pointedly questioned the public health advice to close schools, saying it made no sense to have a national strategy to close all schools, and that the power to make decisions about school closures should not come from Washington, and from a single person. He also warned of the effect of school closures on learning.
“If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home are not going to learn for a full year,” he said.
It’s remarkable to look back at this hearing and to see that so many things that Sen. Paul said early on turned out to be prescient.
In school districts across the country where schools remained closed or operated virtually for the 2020-2021 school year, many children fell behind in reading and math, with the learning loss so severe in cities like Indianapolis and Chicago that three years later, the gaps in academic performance were still significant.
In that hearing, Sen. Paul had also urged Fauci to take a more moderate stance on states re-opening, and was the only senator who seemed to recognize that the pandemic wasn’t nearly as deadly as Americans were being made to believe.
“In rural states, we never really reached any sort of pandemic levels in Kentucky and other states,” he told Fauci. “We have less deaths in Kentucky than we have in an average flu season. It’s not to say this isn’t deadly. But really outside of New England, we’ve had a relatively benign course for this virus nationwide.”
Bringing Fauci to Testify
Sen. Paul said he and the committee he chairs had negotiated for months to try to get information from Fauci.
“We’d get a slow trickle, and then it would come to an end,” he said. “He had agreed to come in voluntarily for a deposition, and then they went up until like the day before the agreement, and they said, ‘No, he’s not coming in.’ So, finally, we lost patience and we sent him a subpoena.”
Sen. Paul said he’s been able to get a great number of documents, including those that constitute Fauci’s diary, thanks to the cooperation of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others in the Trump administration who also want to get to the truth.
“There were two things from January of 2020 that we found out that he was thinking and saying, but was saying completely the opposite, really during the rest of the pandemic,” said Paul.
The first one was an e-mail exchange that Fauci had with a colleague where he wrote that he and other scientists were worried about the virus because it appeared to have been manipulated in a lab.
“So I do believe he knew it all along and suspected it from the very moment,” said Paul, “but then immediately in public, the same scientists who were saying in private that it looked manipulated, immediately came out and said in public – No, no it is implausible that could have come from the lab.”
Paul notes that Fauci also wrote in his diary that in January of 2020, he’d talked to his counterpart in China, George Gao, and Gao had told him that the earliest cases of people falling ill in Wuhan weren’t related to the wet market, where exotic animals are sold, yet Fauci had continued to insist publicly that the wet market was the likely origin of the virus.
“The reason this dishonesty is incredibly important is that if it came from the lab, he bears responsibility for having funded the lab,” said Paul.
Last week, Fauci pleaded the Fifth, refusing to answer any questions from any of the senators.
For that, he faces contempt of Congress.
Rand Paul is the son of former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, the de facto leader of the libertarian movement in America and a hero to many on the libertarian Right. He was raised in Texas, where his father worked as an obstetrician when not serving in office. He graduated from Baylor University in Texas and went on to the Duke University School of Medicine, earning his medical degree in 1988. Paul worked as an ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Kentucky, from 1993 until he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010, to replace Sen. Jim Bunning, who was retiring.
Throughout the pandemic Sen. Paul continued his pointed skepticism of public health authorities, focusing on the funding of gain-of-function research and its likely connection to the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
His pursuit of the truth about the nature of the virus and Fauci’s funding of gain-of-function research at the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, exploded at a July 20, 2021 hearing where Fauci denied that the research the NIH had funded was gain-of-function research and told Paul that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Sen. Paul reminded Fauci that it was a crime to lie to the U.S. Congress and Fauci – an unelected bureaucrat – burst out: “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you!”
Then CDC director Robert Redfield said later that he watched that hearing and was shocked when Fauci denied that the research he was funding – to manipulate a coronavirus to make it more pathogenic and more easily transmissible – was gain-of-function research.
Sen. Paul was unflappable in this hearing, and at the hearings that have followed, continuing his focused questioning of Fauci and other witnesses, never raising his voice and refusing to be deterred from the pursuit of the truth about Covid-19.
Who made it and where? And what was it?
At last week’s hearing, Sen. Paul told Fauci: “The decision to fund gain-of-function research In Wuhan, China, will likely go down as one of the worst public health decisions. Frankly, the American people deserve an apology.”
He asked Fauci to admit that the risks of this research had clearly exceeded any benefit, to apologize and ask forgiveness. It was true he hadn’t personally ordered every lockdown, said Paul, “...but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions. And you presented your recommendations not as judgements, open to debate, but as dictates of science itself.”
Continued Dr. Paul, “More than a million Americans died from COVID-19. Many of them died alone. Workers were forced to choose between a mandate and a job they needed. Businesses closed and never reopened. Children lost years of school they will never get back. Americans lost the freedom to work, to worship, and to decide what went into their own bodies. Nothing we do today can undo those losses. But silence does not honor them either. The American people deserve answers.”
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Fauci should have been locked up 40 years ago.
Some of the people slamming Sen. Paul and praising Fauci should be relieved to know that covid boosters are still available and mRNA flu shots (what could go wrong🤪) will be soon. Blind partisanship will eventually kill you, if it hasn’t already.