'America Funded It': Rand Paul Blasts Fauci and the Media for Suppressing the Lab Leak Theory

The notion that COVID-19 came from a lab was once touted as misinformation. But now the FBI, the Energy Department, and others agree with Paul.

Remember when Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) accused then–White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci of funding China's Wuhan virus lab?

Fauci replied, "Senator Paul, you do not know what you're talking about."

The media loved it. Vanity Fair smirked, "Fauci Once Again Forced to Basically Call Rand Paul a Sniveling Moron."

But now the magazine has changed its tune, admitting, "In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan" and "Paul might have been onto something."

Then what about question two: Did COVID-19 occur because of a leak from that lab?

When Paul confronted Fauci, saying, "The evidence is pointing that it came from the lab!" Fauci replied, "I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating."

Was Paul lying? What's the truth?

The media told us COVID came from an animal, possibly a bat.

But in my new video, Paul points out there were "reports of 80,000 animals being tested. No animals with it."

Now he's released a book, Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, that charges Fauci and others with funding dangerous research and then covering it up.

"Three people in the Wuhan lab got sick with a virus of unknown origin in November of 2019," says Paul. The Wuhan lab is 1,000 kilometers away from where bats live.

Today the FBI, the Energy Department, and others agree with Paul. They believe COVID most likely came from a lab.

I ask Paul, "COVID came from evil Chinese scientists, in a lab, funded by America?"

"America funded it," he replies, "maybe not done with evil intentions. It was done with the misguided notion that 'gain-of-function' research was safe."

Gain-of-function research includes making viruses stronger.

The purpose is to anticipate what might happen in nature and come up with vaccines in advance. So I push back at Paul, "They're trying to find ways to stop diseases!"

He replies, "Many scientists have now looked at this and said, 'We've been doing this gain-of-function research for quite a while.' The likelihood that you create something that creates a vaccine that's going to help anybody is pretty slim to none."

Paul points out that Fauci supported "gain-of-function" research.

"He said in 2012, even if a pandemic occurs…the knowledge is worth it." Fauci did write: "The benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks."

Paul answers: "Well, that's a judgment call. There's probably 16 million families around the world who might disagree with that."

Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) didn't give money directly to the Chinese lab. They gave it to a nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. The group works to protect people from infectious diseases.

"They were able to accumulate maybe over $100 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars, and a lot of it was funneled to Wuhan," says Paul.

EcoHealth Alliance is run by zoologist Peter Daszak. Before the pandemic, Daszak bragged about combining coronaviruses in Wuhan.

Once COVID broke out, Daszak became less eager to talk about these experiments. He won't talk to me.

"Peter Daszak has refused to reveal his communications with the Wuhan lab," complains Paul. "I do think that ultimately there is a great deal of culpability on his part.… They squelched all dissent and said, 'You're a conspiracy theorist if you're saying this [came from a lab],' but they didn't reveal that they had a monetary self-incentive to cover this up," says Paul.

"The media is weirdly uncurious about this," I say to Paul.

"We have a disease that killed maybe 16 million people," Paul responds. "And they're not curious as to how we got it?"

Also, our NIH still funds gain of function research, Paul says.

"This is a risk to civilization. We could wind up with a virus…that leaks out of a lab and kills half of the planet," Paul warns.

Paul's book reveals much more about Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance. I will cover more of that in this column in a few weeks.

COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

Comments

[Don't look at me!]

Fauci must answer for his crimes against humanity.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

To me, his worst crime against humanity is how he has almost single-handedly made people think "science" is a dirty name, full of liars. Climate scientists have actually done far more worse, except too many people still believe in AGW. Fauci has had more immediate affect.

[BigT]

RICO charges might be in order.

[Rob Misek]

For christs sake, it’s the most often employed strategy and we keep falling for it.

Now, a year after over a million US citizens have died from it, the truth comes out about its lab origin a collaboration between Chinese and Americans.

“I told you so” doesn’t quite satisfy.

Imagine the justice if we all knew what our governments did while everyone and our economy was dying.

The strategy, bad news is better for the guilty when it’s old.

[Rob Misek]

While the Israeli slaughter of Palestinian civilians rages, we will hear nothing but pro Israeli propaganda from the complicit media.

After the dust settles and the Palestinian children’s bodies are counted, the genocide done, the truth will be old news.

We will never forget.

[B G]

The issues around AGW are more based in spin from non-scientists combined with a relatively low level of public awareness of what certain statements and terms mean within the context of actual science.

There is a high level of agreement among legitimate science that large-scale human activities have some impact on factors like atmospheric CO2 levels, maybe even the oft-cited "97 percent" agreement on that level. There's not nearly that level of agreement on the idea that humanity is the sole or primary cause of everything that's happening, or that certain CO2 concentrations will absolutely cause certain levels of global net temperature change, or even which of the underlying assumptions which are used to simplify the multitude of computer "climate models" are the ones which are most likely to produce an accurate simulation of the real world.

The question of whether or not Fauci was aware of the research in Wuhan which his agencies confirmed they had indirectly funded (a week after Fauci himself denied it under oath in Congress) is much more "black and white". As are the facts that the initial "proof" that no such research had been funded at the Wuhan Institute consisted of a letter written by Daszak, and that Daszak himself was directly involved as the head of the organization used as a go-between in order to circumvent the US laws prohibiting funding that kind of research at Chinese facilities.

I'd hope that the people who now question Fauci's credibility (I know people whose media cocoons are so tight that they still believe that the man never did anything even questionable, let alone dishonest or criminal), were already aware that his apoplexy ("questioning me is questioning Science" as if he was the earthly avatar for a n intangible concept) was a narcissist flaming out and behaving in an ascientific manner, rather than the process of science itself failing.

[Granite]

Remember from 2006 to 2014 they were spraying grids - aerosols - all over the world and then it stopped. We now no longer see cross hatch airplane trails - why? It’s stumped me for some time until I came across the latest debates regarding how to stop the rise in temp. The main proposal is of course atmospheric spraying of aerosols but the main reason they’re apprehensive of trying it is due to a phenomenon called “termination shock.” This is when you stop spraying, sometime down the line the temp will rebound, and they’re worried that it could be severe and abrupt - just like what we saw this year.

[B G]

WTF are you rambling about?

As an engineer with 25 years (so far) working in Aerospace (not on the airliners side of the industry, though), my best guess as to why airplane "trails" might be getting less common is the increasingly widespread use of "winglets" on airliners and even PJs.

Those little vertical extensions on the outboard ends of airplane wings are designed to reduce drag on the planes (and increase fuel efficiency) by spreading out the vorticies which form around the ends of airplane wings to be less concentrated. Since the "trails" which get left behind larger airplanes become visible when water vapor trapped in those vorticies condenses to levels more like what's present in clouds vs ambient air, when the vortex is spread wider, the vapor doesn't condense as much and it takes a higher level of ambient humidity for a visible trail to form.

Nobody stopped "spraying" in 2014, because nobody started in 2006. I'm all for questioning the MSM and getting the truth from "alternative" sources, but just because a lot of truth has been suppressed as "conspiracy theory" lately doesn't mean that literally every conspiracy theory is actually true.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

Whatever happened to, "It's just like the flu"?

[Don't look at me!]

Turns out , it’s true.

[B G]

It's not just like the flu. Flu has a significantly higher case fatality rate in children than any strain of Covid 19.

[Raleigh Slappy]

The "crime against humanity" wasn't the relatively innocuous virus, Episiarch/Bo Cara Esq. (erstwhile Mike "White Mikey" Laursen), you retarded sack of shit.

[mad.casual]

And people getting gassed in ovens is morally the same as people turning on the gas and putting their own heads in the oven to you too, eh?

Do you do this to look like a despised, braindead sociopath or to try to convince other people that it's cool to look like a despised, braindead sociopath or what?

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Whatever happened to libertarians prefer minimal government that does not lie to people and try to command their lives, you sack of shit?

[Sevo]

"Whatever happened to, “It’s just like the flu”?"

Whatever happened to your brain-cells, shit bag? Were you born without any, or did you purposely drain them out?

[Junkmailfolder]

If you had to choose between your 2 year old child getting the flu or getting COVID-19, what would you choose?

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Don't forget how many people Fauci killed during the AIDS panic.

[Stuck in California]

Remembering how he was one of the few to question The Science ™ loudly and publicly, I'm thinking if we ever have an "I told you so" Olympics, Paul gets to be the guy who lights the torch.

[Idaho-Bob]

Yeah, I remember some of the media claiming Paul wasn't a doctor, so his opinion was moot. Paul shows his creds, and the media response is "you're not a virologist!"

Good times.

[A Thinking Mind]

He's clearly not a real doctor because he doesn't blindly listen to authority.

[B G]

If you'd have asked every "respected expert" in the world in summer of 2019, at least half would have named Jay Batacharya as one of the top five "voices to listen to" about what to do in a pandemic.

Then he co-authored and signed the Great Barrington Declaration, along with hundreds of other formerly "respected experts" and instantly became a "crackpot" because he dared to oppose the authoritarian solution which turns out to have created huge collateral costs to those who were never really in any danger while at the same time failing to really prevent anyone from dying (although some deaths were postponed which was always what the result of "flattening the curve" was going to be.

In terms of which steps in the progression of treatment and "prevention" of Covid, the one thing which probably saved the most lives was decreasing the use of respirators and the increased use of steroids and possibly anti-viral medications. Since the median age of US covid deaths is now higher than the average life expectancy was when the people currently that age were born, odds are that most of the people who have been "saved" by the vaccines won't live to see the next Presidential inauguration.

[KevinK]

No, That goes to Barbara Lee.

[ElvisIsReal]

Before he was The Science, Fauci actually wasn't too bad about covid. Check out what he wrote in February 2020, then realize that the real-life data never once changed.........

https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/experts-now-claim-we-didnt-know-but

"If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively."

Remember when you’d get thrown off social media for saying “Covid is a bad flu”? Well, here are three ‘expert’ scientists saying the exact same thing. Remember, by April 2020 we had already determined (through antibody testing) that the virus was far more widespread than the ‘experts’ believed — and therefore the IFR was far lower than the initial estimates gleaned from infecting all the at-risk at once in hospitals and nursing homes. (By July 2020, Stanford scientist John Ioannidis estimated the IFR at 0.27% — the equivalent of a bad flu season. He was promptly canceled.)

[Roberta]

And yet for months afterward, authorities kept pushing the idea that thru testing and isolation the disease could be contained and eradicated — that all we had to do was endure a brief period of restrictions on all our activities.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

When your only tool is totalitarian authority, every problem looks like uncooperative societies.

[Its_Not_Inevitable]

No, wasn't it just two weeks to flatten the curve?

[Zeb]

Yeah, but you can't maintain that lie for more than 2 weeks, so it was rapidly updated.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Don't forget that Fauci was telling everyone that wearing masks wasn't really going to make a difference, then did a complete 180 and said everyone needed to wear them to slow the spread. The New England Journal of Medicine did the exact same thing with their article in April 2020, then had to walk it back with some half-assed "this isn't really what we meant" bullshit because their very clear scientific conclusions, based on 100 years of research going back to the Spanish flu pandemic, was being cited by the "wrong" people.

COVID probably did more to kill the cult of credentialism and "expertise" more effectively than anything else the Big-Brained Class has done in the last 50 years.

[B G]

That was the one reversal on his part that I actually understood.

When he said that people shouldn't bother with masks, hospitals were struggling to get enough PPE and the public was hoarding TP, bottled water, and hand sanitizer; meanwhile the WHO was still denying that the virus was transmitted through the air anyway. Telling people at that time not to buy masks might have helped get needed equipment into the hands of workers since telling people who are already hoarding anything that there's something they need to protect themselves is only going to cause even more hoarding.

[Milton_Fan]

The underlying justification for that lie is the argument that it's OK to lie to people if it's for the "common good".

There are three problems with that argument. (1) The person who tells that lie loses all credibility with the people. If he has admitted lying to us once, that why should we believe anything that he says in the future? (2) Who designated Fauci the arbiter of all things related to science? What if his belief that the action he is proposing "for the common good" is wrong? (3) Deceiving people for their own good is a direct violation of a core libertarian principle. We do not have the right to force someone to do something even if we believe that that action will benefit that person.

[B G]

I didn't say I thought the whole course of action was justified, only that I at least understood the motivation for doing it at the time it happened and do think that the intention wasn't rooted in either malice or self-serving ass-covering the way that so many of the other lies around Covid were.

[DesigNate]

Except he didn’t need to reverse it and tell everyone they should double mask once he felt like hospitals had enough PPE.

[B G]

The anti-trump contingent whose interests Fauci was pulling for by that time have a huge overlap with the "do something" statists who don't really care about results, they just need to see some kind of movement out of the upper echelons of government; whether it's a ban on "assault weapons" or a mask/vax mandate, as long as it irritates someone who they happen to disagree and involves a restriction on individuals it makes no difference to them whether or not it actually "works".

Fauci didn't need to tell people to double-mask for medical reasons (and had to rely on cherry-picked "data" to make anything like a case for why it might make a difference), but he needed to "do something" for political reasons and double-masking corresponded to the number on the list that matched the total of the dice he probably rolled to decide what that something would be.

[Medulla Oblongata]

https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html

The article examines several of Fauci's "noble lies".

It ends:

Noble lies—small untruths—yield unpredictable outcomes. Nietzsche once wrote, “Not that you lied to me, but that I no longer believe you, has shaken me.” Public health messaging is predicated on trust, which overcomes the enormous complexity of the scientific literature, creating an opportunity to communicate initiatives effectively. Still, violation of this trust renders the communication unreliable. When trust is shattered, messaging is no longer clear and straightforward, and instead results in the audience trying to reverse-engineer the statement based on their view of the speaker’s intent. Simply put, noble lies can rob confidence from the public, leading to confusion, a loss of credibility, conspiracy theories, and obfuscated policy.

Noble lies are a trap. We cannot predict the public’s behavior, and loss of trust is devastating. The general population is far too skeptical to blindly follow the advice of experts, and far too intelligent to be easily duped.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Yeah, that's what the media said at the time, but why should we believe whatever bullshit narrative they were putting out? They weren't doing anything other than parroting what the government told them to say.

The reason Fauci said not to bother with masks was because 100 years of experience had shown that masks don't limit the spread of viruses. That's why the NEJM said the very same thing--that public masking was a psychological mechanism, not an actual preventative measure.

The mask mandates were clearly nothing more than a social control mechanism so the government could see how far they could push these measures through fear-mongering and peer pressure. It didn't have shit to do with science.

[B G]

Why would Fauci actually give advice according to science for a few weeks and then suddenly pivot to carrying the authoritarian/"just do something" agenda for the next 2 years? Especially with his established record of trying to whip up baseless fear to inspire compliance 35 years earlier in the AIDS epidemic?

Why take one stand that's in accordance with the actual science/medical journals for a few weeks, then go to Congress and testify that any "gathering in large groups" was too risky to allow holding sporting events or religious observnces outdoors, but if the gathering was for a BLM rally that answer suddenly "wasn't within his purview"? If it's medically dangerous to gather for any reason at all, then there isn't also one reason for gathering that can't be called unsafe, unless he's answering in a political rather than scientific sense.

[Granite]

So the problem is clearly from the media and the media is in the pocket of the cia. Facts. I dare anyone to refute that.

So if the IC can manipulate the media, they can make any narrative real - at least temporarily. And that’s all they really need isn’t it?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Nick Gillespie: Any of you guys wanna talk about COVID or lab leaks?
Reason staff: Uh, no, I still have friends in this town.
Nick Gillespie: Ok, let's outsource it.

[mad.casual]

Nick Gillespie: C'mon guys! It's with Raaand Paaaul!
Reason staff: Ew, gross. No!

[A Cynical Asshole]

Nick Gillespie: *picks up phone, in dramatic voice* "Get me John Stossel!"

[Unicorn Abattoir]

Trofim Fauci's abusedof federal power to manipulate free speech and wield unconstitutional power over the country was far worse.

[B G]

Fauci didn't actually abuse any power, since he wasn't personally in a position to make policy. He merely recommended panic as policy to those who were in a position to commit such abuses, and also seems to have attempted to organize some kind of concerted effort to conceal his personal involvement and his agency's role in funding research which might or might not have been the project which created the particular strain of Coronavirus that likely was accidentally released from the lab (via infected researchers) and went on to cause the pandemic itself.

Far more damage was done by politicians and media figures who claimed to venerate him and/or using his name and face as a tool for attempting to suppress skepticism but who did so willfully since they weren't subject to any formal authority held by Fauci himself.

Also, he tried to equate himself personally to the entire concept of "Science", while covertly asking for his allies in the community and the US Federal Government to suppress valid lines of inquiry into a possible source of the virus in favor of a much more unlikely natural explanation.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Fauci didn’t actually abuse any power, since he wasn’t personally in a position to make policy.

The perceived professional authority that came with his position didn't provide him with any power? Just because he didn't sign the policy doesn't mean he had no hand in crafting it.

[Brett Bellmore]

Spoiler: These three letter agencies agreed with Paul at the time, too. They just had a policy of lying to the public. The evidence was always in favor of the lab leak theory.

All that's changed is the politics, allowing them to now tentatively acknowledge the evidence. But never, of course, that they had it all along...

[Idaho-Bob]

This will eventually be acknowledged truth regarding the 2020 fraudulent election. Facts will be uncovered, and the government will downplay the entire event. "What difference does it make at this point?"

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

The center-right has been running cover for them, too, saying "well, it was a novel virus and we were doing the best we could with the information we had at that time,"--obfuscating the fact that we HAD the information, and it was either covered up by the government, or the narrative altered for political convenience.

And then, of course, there's the whole specter of the WEF hanging over all of this, with their wargaming of a pandemic outbreak a few months before it happened and then Schwab's thralls in the Five Eyes and other western nations parroting his "Great Reset" initiative.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Oh, and let's not forget the utterly malicious media gayops promoting all these public restrictions as "the new normal," as if this was something that would be perpetuated indefinitely.

[JohannesDinkle]

China, as the Soviet Union did, runs on a sort of war footing. Corners are cut all the time in the need to catch up and pass the evil West. This thought process led to all sorts of problems in the US, which is still dealing with holdovers from WWII and the early Cold War.
In the Chevron refinery at Richmond, California the Army placed antiaircraft guns on the peninsula facing the Golden Gate to stop Japanese bombers and buried a tank car of diesel used to fuel the generators for the guns' electric motors. No blueprints were ever made, so when the tank car started leaking only a couple old-timers remembered why they were there.
Poor record keeping, bad safety protocols, and just plain stupid risks are how things work in China and the problems that creates are routinely covered up. Fauchi helped out of self interest.

[LIBertrans]

Speaking of memory holes, the 1905 article “The protection of the U.S. from Invasion by Disease,” by Walter Wyman, Surgeon-General Marine Hospital Service coincide with Chinese boycotts of US exports (including drugs). The resulting 1906 Pure Drug law causeed the 1907 Panic: The Kaiser openly advocated genocide and Socialist writer Jack London's "The Unparalelled Invasion" predicted as sci-fi Chinese extermination in the 1970s. THEY remember that--and stories of The Hun spreading Spanish Flu--like it was yesterday.

[Roberta]

Who knew that science fiction about cocky scientists experimenting with things man was not meant to know would provide a more accurate view of the world than our paid professionals?

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

'The media loved it. Vanity Fair smirked, "Fauci Once Again Forced to Basically Call Rand Paul a Sniveling Moron."

'But now the magazine has changed its tune, admitting, "In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan" and "Paul might have been onto something."'

So when can we expect the magazine to change its name to Sniveling Moron Monthly?

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Honestly, the biggest crimes here isn’t just the cover-up of funding a front group to conduct research on something that the Obama administration had explicitly forbidden, it’s the fact that the globalist world order used it as an excuse to try and force the entire planet to shut down, rather the promote simple risk mitigation factors, because they were popping a boner over the fact that they could use their power to manipulate and control an entire planet–or at least, the more advanced societies that would be amenable to such measures.

And all the supposed “conspiracy theories” that were mocked during this time–slagging ivermectin as “horse paste”; the fluffing of the body count either by counting those who died WITH Covid as opposed to from Covid, including those who died of completely unrelated causes like car wrecks; the doctors who completely violated their Hippocratic oath by compelling patients to get on ventilators, killed them through sepsis, and then counted it as a COVID death; claiming every single excess death was a COVID death; claiming that the vaccines weren’t causing any injuries on the back end while young people continue to mysteriously drop dead of “unknown causes” (including, notably, the kid in Israel that was used in ads to promote the shots, he recently had a heart attack at 8 years old and died in the bathtub); and of course, that COVID came from someone eating bat soup instead of it escaping from a poorly run lab–that eventually came out to have legitimacy, or were confirmed long after the effects of their power trip were made apparent.

Every single one of these people who pushed this shit needs to be shoved through a woodchipper. God bless Rand Paul for holding the line on this and refusing to let fuckheads like Fauci off the hook, or celebrity cancer cells like Richard Marx from pushing their usual establishment-fellating bullshit.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

I am still disgusted, and frightened, by how eagerly so much of the US population not only embraced the authoritarians, but literally begged for more. Perhaps seeing conspiracy in the predominance of emotional fragility and rising acceptance of the nanny state is too much, but it’s a hell of a coincidence.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

I'm not necessarily frightened by it because, while these oligarchs with god complexes have a shit-ton of power, what the pandemic showed is that the institutions they lord over are a lot more fragile and subject to single points of failure than they realize. The current generations of adults in these countries are clearly not ready in any way for the massive responsibility of trying to hold everything together. They might have the heart, but they don't have the tools.

Regardless of whatever authoritarian bullshit they pull in the coming years, I take some comfort in the fact that no empire lasts forever, and that includes the current globalist world order.

[Zeb]

Yeah, I'm still pretty much in shock about the whole fucking mess. I really thought it couldn't last (people's tolerance/enthusiasm for restrictions) through summer 2020.

[Medulla Oblongata]

"including those who died of completely unrelated causes like car wrecks"

And in one case, at least, a murder-suicide was counted as COVID deaths.

https://www.skyhinews.com/news/grand-county-coroner-claims-state-is-inflating-covid-19-death-count/

Coroner Brenda Bock updated commissioners on Tuesday about her efforts to remove a murder-suicide from the state’s COVID-19 death count, which seems unlikely given officials’ response.

It’s grated on Bock that a Fraser couple’s death at the end of November has been included with the state’s COVID-19 death reporting, even though investigators determined the incident was a murder-suicide. The Fraser couple had tested positive for COVID-19 in the month before they died.

A spokesperson with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment confirmed that the two deaths are included with the state’s count of deaths among cases. The state currently reports five COVID-19 deaths in Grand County, while the coroner argues only two deaths have actually been caused by the coronavirus.

Bock found the June death of one man who later tested positive for the virus to be from natural causes, due to a sudden cardiac death and not related to the coronavirus. The couple’s official cause of death was blunt force trauma due to gunshot wounds.

“Even when (the state is) supposed to take information off of death certificates, they don’t,” Bock said over the phone Wednesday. “Nowhere on the death certificate does it say COVID.”

According to Bock, the two shooting deaths will count as deaths due to COVID for Grand in the state’s reporting because both decedents tested positive for COVID-19.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Yeah, that's just a microcosm of how the powers that be were invested in inflating the COVID body count.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

'Gain-of-function research includes making viruses stronger.

'Paul points out that Fauci supported "gain-of-function" research.'

What if the desired functional gain is in political and societal manipulation?

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

'"The media is weirdly uncurious about this," I say to Paul.'

And the Pope is weirdly uncurious about challenges to his preferred doctrine.

[SRG2]

So if it had a natural origin, Covid is really like a bad cold and the government is exaggerating its virulence but if it came from a lab leak, the identical virus is like a worse form of Ebola.

For the record, I initially thought a natural origin was high likelihood and a lab leak, a low likelihood. More recently, I have reversed those in the light of evidence - the advantage of not committing to certainty in the absence of proof.

[JesseAz]

So we won't find you attacking those of us who suspected lab leak early on... do I bother checking.

Youre in the alliance of nearly always wrong who attack those who have been nearly always right. Calling those who are right conspiracy theorist.

[SRG2]

That you're accidentally right - in all likelihood - in this case proves nothing. You were already primed to believe the lab leak story before there was any evidence to support it.

You come up with so much other conspiratorial BS here, that when you are right the rebuttable presumption should be that it's by accident.

[Don't look at me!]

LOL. Asshole can’t admit he was wrong.

[Set Us Up The Chipper]

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an article on May 5 2021 written by Nicholas Wade that basically laid out the argument for the lab leak. This was all over twitter, roundly panned by Team Apocalypse, etc. Most of the arguments have not changed since then.

Although, the obvious reason that everyone should have - at least - considered that a lab leak was definitely a possibility was the proximity of the lab to the original outbreak.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Although, the obvious reason that everyone should have – at least – considered that a lab leak was definitely a possibility was the proximity of the lab to the original outbreak.

I’ll mention here again that Jerryskids, a mere occasional commenter on HnR, pointed this out about 2-3 days after the news reports started being put on full blast.

[A Thinking Mind]

The problem is the disinformation and not the number of deaths you can attribute to the virus. People are able to believe that the number of deaths is heavily inflated, but also that the number of deaths is too high when it was funded illegally by the government. And the harm of this virus goes well beyond the mere number of dead but all of the harmful actions taken by the government in response to the virus. The government is implicated in releasing a virus that led to government seizing immense powers to quarantine and shut down the normal operation of life.

Plus there's the just-as-big sin of the lie and cover-up. The government was censoring people for revealing true information that made Fauci and NIH look bad, not allowing proper discourse on the matter. Because of COURSE if the government is going to censor information, that's the sort of information it will censor, and that's why censorship is a big fucking deal. This whole deal is like something out of a Tom Clancy novel that seems too outlandish to ever happen in reality, except it absolutely is reality.

That's not to mention all the other lies the government told us about Covid, about masks, about testing, about vaccines. Anything that could feasibly used as a tool of control was employed and all of it was based on questionable information or outright disinformation.

[mad.casual]

And the harm of this virus goes well beyond the mere number of dead but all of the harmful actions taken by the government in response to the virus.

And, again, the whole purpose of these organizations and the people they employ was the exact opposite.

There are successes, there are nominal failures, partial failures, governance failures, total failures, systemic failures, catastrophic failures... all refer to generally passive systems simply failing to achieve their aims and potentially achieving some collateral aims. This was an active, self-aware systems with multiple achievements in direct the opposition to virtually all of its aims, stated and implied, orders of magnitude above any beneficial aims or outcomes (even of similar successful systems). This was a mendacious or malicious failure.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

COVID was clearly reaping through old, fat people who happened to have a lot of other health issues. That was pretty obvious when New York City was releasing morbidity data in the early weeks of the thing.

For younger people, we don't know if they were actually killed by COVID, or by a doctor shoving a vent down their throat for days on end.

[JFree]

For younger people, we don’t know if they were actually killed by COVID, or by a doctor shoving a vent down their throat for days on end.

This is the US. The most obese country on Earth that isn’t a South Pacific Island. Younger people are also obese. We are so obese that many do not recognize that they are obese because, looking around at everyone, obesity is normal. Obesity was a major association with (and yes cause of ) covid severity, hospitalization, ICU, and death. Intubation is a medical procedure that is an ‘option’ an ‘alternative’ to 100% certainty of death. Not a very good one but – look at the 100% certainty of death.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that we failed to make obesity the main public health takeaway from covid after the vaccine eliminated covid’s effect on public health. The CDC is incompetent. There’s a lot more money in treating obesity than in eliminating it. And politicization requires stuck on stupid so it is necessary that 2020 arguments about masks, lockdowns, schools, etc persist for at least two more generations.

It’s ironic that Americans are now more obese than before covid even with the higher obese death rate during covid.

[Its_Not_Inevitable]

So how do you propose "we" make obesity the main public health concern and eliminate it? Lock down the food supply? Two weeks to flatten the stomach?

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Bread lines!

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Here's the thing--the only demonstrated way of actually mitigating something like this would be the playbook they used for tobacco use. Tobacco use has been cut by over half since the mid-60s, first through forcing the tobacco companies to put warnings on their products, then forcing them to fund anti-tobacco use campaigns, coupled with increasing prices on cigarettes to the point that being a chain-smoker will fucking bankrupt you.

People wouldn't like it, and a lot of food companies would shit their pants, but that's the only effective way we've seen to lessen the public use of something that's been deemed a personal public health hazard. I'm honestly shocked they haven't implemented it anywhere else.

[Zeb]

Maybe at least stop pretending that being obese isn't a serious health risk.

[JFree]

And maybe provide the research on the risks, the pathologies, what works/doesn't, etc to GP doctors so they can better help their patients.

(Non-libertarian approach) Maybe provide doctors the same opportunity currently provided to pharma cos and research unis to prioritize research on specific paths. Those are basically a subsidy - but currently the US spends about 4x more on 'rare disease' research than on obesity/diabetes research combined. Nuts. Call it a lack of open competition for the research subsidy.

[DesigNate]

Every GP I’ve ever been to already knew and advertised the risks of obesity.

[Medulla Oblongata]

Well, obesity certainly was a complicating factor. But the #1 factor seemed to "Being over 85 years old" combined with "multiple comorbidities" (which typically included obesity).

[Zeb]

Who is saying what your first paragraph claims?
Almost no one is saying that covid wasn't anything to be concerned about. Comparing to a bad flu isn't minimizing it. A bad flu is pretty serious and tends to kill a lot of people.
If the virus was the result of a research project, that's really bad and should be carefully looked into. If it was natural, then it sucks, but it's just the sort of thing that happens from time to time and we have to live with it. If it was artificial, then there are people who bear moral and should bear legal responsibility and practices that should be changed.

[DesigNate]

“So if it had a natural origin, Covid is really like a bad cold and the government is exaggerating its virulence but if it came from a lab leak, the identical virus is like a worse form of Ebola.”

Lol, wut?

[Medulla Oblongata]

"but if it came from a lab leak, the identical virus is like a worse form of Ebola."

What? No.

If the virus was caused by questionable live/wet market practices in China, we could hope that China might make some changes in how those markets operate (I wouldn't hold my breath).

OTOH, if the virus originated due to a lab leak in China, and Fauci's NIH was funding it, there would be people needing to be keel-hauled. And it's one more reason to hate the CCP and the US government (now they're in cahoots?).

The interesting question is *why* was the lab-leak question so forcefully denied? Wouldn't it have been easier to say something like "Well, anything is possible, but our investigation is pointing at wet markets at this time".

The level of denial of any hint of lab-leak talk was so over-the-top as to lead most anyone to wonder "What are they trying to cover up". "Move along nothing to see here" almost ALWAYS means "Something to see here that we don't want you to see."

The origin doesn't change the virus, so why did the powers-that-be spend so much time and effort trying to dissuade the public that it could not *possibly* have been from a lab leak?

[Longtobefree]

You know, John, this is not exactly 'news'.
We aren't discovering things, we are confirming things.
And strangely, not a single fascist has faced people's justice.

[MWAocdoc]

Rand Paul's new book IS news. The media not exactly admitting that it was wrong and shifting the blame to NIH "shifting" its narrative is NOT news.

[Dillinger]

>>Fauci did write: "The benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks."

should have disqualified him from any public employment on psychopath grounds but it's our government ... so promote that man!

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Yeah, it's funny how, in pop culture, these "ends justify the means" types are usually portrayed as antagonists, but in real life the people who make these stories fellated someone who did just that.

[MWAocdoc]

What's most disturbing about for me about all of this is that people who are intelligent and who should know better never seem to learn the important lessons from this and many, many other examples: that the facts about news events and some kind of objective investigation of them is important and should come BEFORE the news entertainment industry knee-jerks the social narrative line to the public. They don't seem to get how foolish and unreliable they look to anyone who hasn't already drunk the democratic socialist koolaid. They seem to hold fast to the assumption that the social narrative is more important than the truth, but then can't seem to understand why trust in institutions is at an all-time low and getting worse!

[LIBertrans]

Stossel usually reports informative stuff. Everybody knows both looter parties are packed with liars. The Communist party withered and was absorved entirely by the Dems it now controls like some parasitical worm. They stop us from having electric power or defensive weapons, as China wishes in its wettest dreams. Randal's looter faction is the same Christian National Socialism that kept women in the Kitchen, Church and squeezing out Hitlerjugend cannon fodder after the Herbert Hoover Republican Administration wrecked their economy and ours. So count on Randal to correctly say the Red Chinese Bolsheviks are liars. What else is new?

[EISTAU Gree-Vance]

Wow. Lol. Ok, but do you have any thoughts about fauci, hank? How, exactly, did the girl bulliers corrupt this public servant?

[Truthfulness]

Hank clearly doesn't believe in accountability for one's actions.

[TJJ2000]

Remember that day the Constitution was amended to authorize the feds to do gain of function research????

Yeah; Me neither F’En [Na]tional So[zi]alist[s]….

It’s truly amazing how much of this Nazi sh*t could be avoided if people and politicians would just HONOR the founding definition (their own F’En law over their government) of the USA instead of constantly try to violate it and build a Democratic Nazi-Empire.

[KevinK]

Dear John, was this intentional misdirection? Or do you think it is clear that it is only Paul's 'slim to none' opinion?
He replies, "Many scientists have now looked at this and said, 'We've been doing this gain-of-function research for quite a while.' The likelihood that you create something that creates a vaccine that's going to help anybody is pretty slim to none."

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

What's your point, shitheel?

[Truthfulness]

There's no misdirection in the COVID-19 lab leak theory. The evidence points to there being the origin.

[Muzamal]

hi