U.S. Senator Rand Paul and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. share their experiences with coronavirus and censorship in this historic episode.
Here is the description of Rand Paul's new book, Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up:
Senator Rand Paul was on to Anthony Fauci from the start. Wielding previously unimaginable power, Fauci misled the country about the origins of the Covid pandemic and shut down scientific dissent.One of the few leaders who dared to challenge "America’s Doctor" was Senator Rand Paul, himself a physician. Deception is his indictment of the catastrophic failures of the public health bureaucracy during the pandemic.Senator Paul presents the evidence that:
The Covid virus was likely the product of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab in China—research funded in part by the U.S. government.
Taxpayer dollars for that research were deceptively funneled to Wuhan without the required regulatory review.
Fauci and his scientific yes-men knew from day one about Covid’s origin and tried to cover it up.
Fauci and his allies ruthlessly attacked everyone—including highly qualified scientists—who threatened to reveal the truth about the pandemic.
Why? Hundreds of millions of dollars of grants and unreported royalties were at stake, and heads would roll if the truth got out.
https://www.amazon.com/Deception-Great-Cover-Up-Rand-Paul/dp/1684515130
United States Senator Rand Paul M.D. is one of our nation's leading advocates for liberty.
He was elected to the United States Senate in 2010.
Dr.
Paul has proven to be an outspoken champion for constitutional rights, for fiscal responsibility, as a fierce advocate against government overreach.
Dr.
Paul has fought tirelessly to return government to its limited constitutional scope.
As a hardworking and dedicated physician, not a career politician, Dr.
Paul came to Washington Today, I want to push this new book that is trending all over the internet, and that is Rand Paul's long-awaited book, The Great Cover-Up by Rand Paul.
And Senator Paul, I've been an opponent of you on some issues, but a great admirer for always, always for your integrity, for your fearless championship of civil rights, constitutional rights, for your outspokenness about the military-industrial complex and about the U.S. addiction to war.
And you and I have found ourselves very, very close together since the beginning of COVID on so many issues.
You were the one person in Congress and I'd say the one person in public life who was seeing through the orthodoxies and at the same time had the power and the willingness to speak out loud about it.
So I have nothing but admiration for you and gratitude.
Or what you did, if you had not existed in the Senate right now, I think most of the public and most of the world would still believe all of the mythologies about Francis Collins and about Rand Paul, and they would still believe that the government agencies are on the side of public health and that the COVID vaccine miraculously saved millions of lives.
So I want to thank you, first of all, not only for being here, but just for all that you've done to restore some kind of semblance of truth and honesty to public life and political courage.
So thank you.
Let's talk about deception and about Anthony Fauci.
Can you just tell us a little bit about your evolution?
Did you approach this with kind of a posture of skepticism from the outset, or was there something that That had you scratching your head and saying, wait a minute, something's wrong with this.
You know, in the beginning, I was very resistant from the very, very beginning to the mandates on behavior, the idea that masks work.
I come from the medical profession, and I was aware of the studies on influenza showing that for respiratory viruses, influenza, you know, they wanted to know if wearing masks in the hospital would prevent the doctors and nurses from getting sick.
This has been studied for decades, and all the studies really haven't shown that it helped, and it didn't help in public wear.
So I was aware of that and resistant to that and closing the schools early on.
But as far as the origins of the virus, it took me a year.
I was following some of the stuff very closely, the rules and edicts from government.
But the origins, I remember reading a letter in Lancet, 27 doctors or scientists signed it, and I really didn't read it closely.
I just assumed, well, you know, the last...
Coronavirus came from nature in 2003.
They found it came from civets.
And I just thought that they were probably just telling the truth.
A year later, though, I read an article by Nicholas Wade, and it just opened my eyes.
And it was about a 50-page article.
I learned later that nobody would publish it.
He self-published it on Medium.com because he was censored everywhere.
He has an impeccable pedigree.
He's written for the New York Times.
He's been a science writer.
He's got all kinds of background and resume, and nobody would print it.
But as I read through, I discovered not only were there scientific reasons that the virus in all likelihood came from a lab, but I learned from the Freedom of Information Act that all of the scientists who were saying you're crazy, you're a conspiracy theorist, if you say it came from the lab, were all privately saying the opposite.
We also learned Anthony Fauci was saying the opposite also.
When friends would ask him, do you need to wear a mask?
He was saying, we've studied this, they don't work.
You know, just be careful about your interactions or whatever.
If you're sick, don't go out.
But he, in private, was saying the opposite.
So I guess the freedom of information, revelation of the virologist, who were all saying privately, they thought it came from the lab, and then publicly they were saying the opposite, got me intrigued.
But then also the science of it.
The fact that when a virus comes from an animal, it typically is clumsy because it doesn't infect humans well.
It's been adapted or evolved to infect animals, so it makes various forays into humans, and it does it many times until it accidentally mutates and then can be transmitted among humans.
But it's always more infectious from the animal it came from than it is from humans.
But we discovered with COVID, as we looked at the sequences early on, that there weren't a bunch of leaps to man.
There seemed to be one lineage that leaped in the very beginning, which points towards one source, which points towards a lab leak.
But all of this added up and I became intrigued and somewhat obsessed by the questions over the origin.
But then I also, as I became convinced that it came...
And just to interrupt you, Senator Pollack, because I think you meant to make this point...
It also no longer infected bats, which is very, very unusual, because it should have remained most infectious to bats and secondarily to humans, if it were not.
Either bats or an intermediate species.
And one of the interesting things we point out in the book is that A professor in Australia took the Oracle supercomputer and modulated the 3D aspects of the proteins and their interaction with different species, assuming he would find that COVID was better adapted for some animal, and that would give us a clue as to which animal.
He did all of it.
It didn't fit any of the animals very well, didn't fit bats well, didn't fit civets, pangolins, but the perfect, almost near perfect match was for humans.
So all of this modeling showed there didn't seem to be an intermediate species.
Whether it came directly from bats or from bats to another species, the computers were showing that the fit was actually better for humans.
And Alina Chan wrote a good book on this viral.
And in that, she says that when she looked at this, she felt like the virus was pre-adapted for human transmission.
I think Anthony Fauci knew this in January of 2020.
I think he's known it from the very beginning.
And I do think there was an enormous conspiracy or cover-up because they knew that they had funded this lab in Wuhan and that if it came from the lab, that culpability, you know, blame would attach to them for the pandemic.
And so they strove from the very beginning to cover it up.
And there's just a trail of lies, you know, lies, obfuscations, cover-up.
And, you know, in the book, we go through all of this.
Let's talk about a couple of the characters.
Let's begin with Peter Daszak.
So Peter Daszak runs EcoHealth, and I call him sort of the bag man for Wuhan, China.
He's basically a money guy.
He has a scientific background, but his expertise is in collecting government grants.
And you would think that scientists come to Washington and they're wearing their little nerdy glasses and they're, I want to cure cancer.
Give me some money for cancer.
It's not actually the way it's working these days.
Peter Daszak comes to Washington.
He goes to a place called the Cosmo Club.
He spends 20 grand on cocktails and food for those that come to the party.
But who does he invite?
He's not schmoozing politicians.
He's actually schmoozing bureaucrats like Fauci.
So this is a guy that over the years has gotten over $100 million from the government.
But he gets it through schmoozing and through fancy proposals.
But I don't believe he's an honest player.
I think he does have information and did have information from China involving the viruses and in all likelihood involving a virus much closer to COVID-19 that may well have come out of the lab.
I think he has the information on all this and has not been revealing it.
But I think that in the end, he's evidence of what's gone wrong and what's gone amok in the scientific community and in the grant community.
And one of our sources, you know, we used for the book was The Real Anthony Fauci.
Your book, The Real Anthony Fauci.
I just finished your latest one as well.
So there's so much going on here, but my main goal now in exposing is to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Robert Redfield and others have said they think we're going to have another virus that will accidentally leak into the public and that the death toll could be much higher.
In the end, COVID was bad, and I don't downplay it, but the death rate was 0.3%.
That's about a million in America, maybe 10 to 15 million.
But there are viruses that they are working with that they're trying to aerosolize and make easier to transmit among humans that have between a 5 and 50% mortality.
We are dealing with something that's as explosively bad as nuclear weapons.
The same way we should always be talking to our enemies now about nuclear weapons to Russia and to China and to Iran and have open dialogue on these things, we should be having the same on viruses.
Doesn't mean we can always trust them, but we should be having international conventions on how we should try to limit the dangerous research and not fund research that basically could be a risk to our civilization.
Yeah, you know, one of the things that I... I discovered when I was writing my kind of history of the bio-warfare is that we had a really good Nixon actually went and closed all of our bio-warfare programs unilaterally and said, America's not doing this anymore.
And then negotiated treaties in 1973, a bioweapons charter with the rest of the world.
And that that stood, there was a lot of people who were angry, who were making a living on bioweapons.
And they were sort of seething for many years.
And then when the Patriot Act Yeah, I think.
Fauci's career took off because the Pentagon did not want to start doing bioweapons because it wasn't sure whether the legality of the Patriot Act.
They started funneling money to Anthony Fauci to do it under the pretext of vaccine development, and that was the beginning of this program.
And this is one of my goals as we move forward.
People say, well, what are we going to do?
Some is about, you know, culpability of those who lied to us.
But to me, it's more important that this doesn't happen again.
So we're trying to devise legislation to take gain-of-function research, research that creates new viruses not known to nature that are more transmissible or more lethal, To have an independent body, independent of the funding mechanism that oversees this.
Almost like a nuclear regulatory commission, some people that are going to be experts that have the ability to look at all research, including bioweapons research, take it and advise whether or not we should be funding this or not.
If we're successful in our country, and I'm trying to get a Democrat on board right now, I'm of the opinion that This,
the same way as nuclear weapons, we've sort of dropped off the idea of nuclear weapons control, too.
We don't talk to China.
We say it's impossible.
The Trump administration quit the negotiations.
I think there always have to be negotiations.
And in fact, the farther apart you are in negotiations, the more reason you should still be negotiating over deadly things like nuclear weapons or like biological weapons as well.
So I'm hopeful that we move forward.
The main sticking point has been because Anthony Fauci has been the focus of this because he was in charge of so much, the Democrats have steadfastly decided that he's a saint.
He gets awards.
He gets million dollar prizes.
You know, he still gets a security detail and a limo pick him up every day, even though he's out of office.
They really are unwilling to understand that he was part of the problem.
So it's limited any kind of reforms coming forward.
I think we may be getting finally beyond that.
So I am hopeful by the end of the year that we can pass bipartisan reform legislation that will have more oversight and scrutiny of gain-of-function research.
Yeah, I mean, I really looked at some frightening things at the end of my book about the marriage of AI, you know, with the gain-of-function and the organic chemistry science that already exists.
They're already, as you know, in China, Russia, Iran, other places, experimenting with these viruses with very high infection fatality rates like Ebola, like dengue, chickamonga, 50% infection fatality, and some of them dying in terrible ways, bleeding from your eyes, et cetera.
And if they did that, if they release one of those next time or it escapes, however, whatever happens, Civil rights and constitutional rights are gone because, you know, we've already seen how they can use fear to disable the capacity for critical thinking in the population and to disable the love that Americans have for their constitutional rights.
And it just overwhelms it.
Can you imagine?
Smallpox had about a 30% mortality.
Some of these have 50% mortality.
Imagine what happens to the function of society.
What happens to the sewage?
What happens to your drinking water?
Chaos ensues very quickly.
And I think that we are even more at risk to this than we've ever been in the modern age because we're dependent on so many things.
But I really think if a virus like that were as infectious as COVID, but were much more deadly, We would talk about people hunkering down on their houses and protecting their food.
There won't be food production.
There won't be mass food production.
Nobody knows too many people growing vegetables.
There are people, but most people aren't getting their food from the garden.
And so it's going to be a catastrophe if this happens, and we have the ability to stop it from happening.
But as we speak, when this interview ends, you could go to your computer and you could order the components of polio virus, and you could make it in a lab if you have the knowledge.
Kevin Esfeldt from MIT, he estimates as many as 50,000 to 60,000 people, not just PhDs, but just sometimes people, technicians, qualified technicians in these labs could create the polio virus, which means they could create smallpox or any of these others with the components.
And so it is a real problem.
It's a disaster.
And interestingly, it didn't start with COVID-19.
Until I got into this, I didn't realize they've been debating gain-of-function research for at least a decade before COVID. And it started with the avian flu.
And there are some great professors out there.
You know, Richard Ebright's been talking about this for 15 years, about the dangers of this.
And there's really been a war in the academic community.
And they want to make it out like, oh, it's just some crazy people.
No.
Richard Ebright was a 17-year editor of the Journal of Biochemistry.
I mean, these are credentialed people at our major universities who think Anthony Fauci was wrong about funding this research.
And there's been a lot of news really coming out of your book about the Diffuse Project, which is a project where Peter Daszak literally wrote a blueprint for how to develop the coronavirus virus that could have been used to develop exactly what they made and talk about what happened there.
So the coronaviruses in this family don't have a special access to the human cell.
That special access is called a furin cleavage site.
And so this had never been seen in this family of viruses.
So in 2018...
And the furin cleavage site, just so they know, It's at the end of that spike protein.
It's almost like a key that fits perfectly into the lock of the ACE2 receptor, which is a cell receptor in the human lung.
So all your cells in your lung have this receptor, and if the coronavirus gets in there, it attaches perfectly to it, and that's what causes infectivity in humans.
And there was no wild coronavirus in history that was ever able to do that.
Right.
So in 2018, the lab in Wuhan, in conjunction with Peter Dezak, in conjunction with Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, submit a proposal.
And their proposal is to take a coronavirus and add this cleavage site, the furin cleavage site, which is going to make it more infectious in humans.
Well, even our government, which seems to fund everything, said that was a crazy idea at DARPA, and they said we're not going to fund it.
The reason that's important is you roll around two years, and then we see the sequence of COVID-19 in January 2020.
And everybody involved with the Diffuse Project should have been going, aha, I can't believe the sequence looks just like what they wanted to propose in 2018, two years ago.
And they should have immediately said, my God, they did it.
This came from the lab.
This is what they were proposing in that research grant.
But you know what?
Not one person came forward to say that.
Nobody in government, well, one did.
Major Joseph Murphy, a lieutenant colonel, a Marine, told his superiors, as he's supposed to, his chain of command.
Then he told the inspector general, and he became a whistleblower.
He revealed this research project.
Anthony Fauci never said a word about it.
Ralph Baric, who's part of it, never said anything about it.
Peter Daszak never said anything about it.
But what we discovered this week is that not only was DARPA looking at this, There was a presentation by Peter Day's Act of 15 different agencies.
That's a lot of people.
That's a big forum.
And all of those people should have been saying, and they've got to be connected to virology.
That's why they would be in this meeting.
Why didn't one of them pick up the phone in January of 2020 when they saw the sequence of the virus and say, oh my God, this is what they were asking for money for two years ago.
So something's going on here and we're still having A great deal of resistance, virtually absolute resistance from the administration to reveal these documents.
And I keep saying them, this has nothing to do with Biden.
This happened during the Trump administration or even the Obama.
This is a longstanding bureaucratic problem as much or more than it is any kind of, you know, one party or the other's problem.
And yet I still get nothing.
So I'd like to see the deliberation.
They decided to fund some research in Wuhan that was gain-of-function, but there had to be some deliberation.
Was it gain-of-function or not?
Anthony Fauci wags his finger at me and says, I've never ever funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
All my experts tell me this wasn't.
And I said, well, let's see the argument because we can learn from the argument because you obviously made a mistake.
It was gain of function and became a pandemic.
So let's see the argumentation that was presented to the bureaucracy, why you made the decision to call this not gain of function, because it was.
We can't get any of that.
All of that's being withheld.
I have a 250-page, and I've got it on my desk, 250-page document that was a briefing for Anthony Fauci on NIH's interaction with coronavirus.
Every word is deleted.
Every word has been erased.
Redacted.
Yeah, redacted.
Every word.
It is insane.
And then he had, Dr.
Fauci had this coterie of Scientists whom he funded with millions and millions of dollars.
And he was able to call them together and create this barrier where they were the leading scientists in the field, supposedly.
They were able to tell the press in various forums in that Proximal Origins paper that was published by the Lancet and a number of other forums where they were all working in different cohorts that this was a zoonotic.
In other words, it was a natural spillover.
It had nothing to do with the lab.
In private, they were all saying to each other, and you got their emails, oh, this has got to be from a lab.
But at the same day that they were saying that to each other, they were telling the public, anybody who says that is a conspiracy theorist.
One of the leading scientists is a guy named Christian Anderson.
There's three or four others.
They're communicating back and forth.
It's all in a very harried sort of one-day sequence till three in the morning, going back and forth.
And they finally send an email to Fauci and they say, the four of us, these are four virologists, world-recognized virologists.
Think that the sequence of the virus is inconsistent with evolutionary theory, meaning that this didn't come from nature.
It's inconsistent with evolution.
And yet, two days later, Christian Anderson is arguing now publicly, the way I like to present this to the press and to the people is I like to make sure they know that it's consistent with evolutionary theory.
So in private, he's saying it's inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
In public, he's now saying the best argument, guys, is to say it's consistent with evolutionary theory.
There's probably never been a more clear example of a cover-up unfolding where people are privately saying, and I'm sure people must say things in private that they don't say in public, but we've never ever seen anything like this where all their thoughts are recorded.
And some of them are saying, I'm 80% convinced this lab.
Some are saying I'm 50-50.
But then the paper they produce that you were talking about, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins say, write up this paper.
They call it proximal origins.
They get it in nature.
In the paper, they say, absolutely, this virus is not a laboratory construct.
They don't say it might not be.
They don't say it probably isn't.
In the abstract, they say this is not a laboratory construct.
And so I don't think I've ever seen anything like this before.
I don't think anybody realized how politicized the scientific process was.
And I think you probably did, because you've seen how the pharmaceutical companies have manipulated things.
But I think the general public has no idea how political this process is.
Yeah, and just so that people know, because I think it's important, it was Grison Anderson, it was Bob Gary, Andrew Rambeau, and Fred Foucher.
And they're all guys who were, who, by the way, Every one of them, after they signed on to this document that they privately believed was wrong and published it, they all got multi-million dollar grants from Dr.
Fauci and Dr.
Collins.
All true.
All true.
Christian Anderson, I believe, got a $9 million grant signed in April of that year.
And, you know, I told you initially, I kind of believed what they were telling us.
The scientists wrote that letter to Lancet, 27 scientists.
I said, well, how could 27 scientists get together in line?
Well, it turns out, and this is when Nicholas Wade and others were reporting this the next year, Of the 27 scientists, it's like seven of them worked for EcoHealth Alliance.
Seven of them were receiving the money that may have created the pandemic, and we're going to trust their opinion to be an honest, unbiased, without conflict interest.
Several of the others were receiving money indirectly through this, and it's amazing.
Lancet just took this.
A year later, they kind of produce a halfway apology.
And then one of the most amazing things is, and I know you know Jeffrey Sachs well.
I'm a big fan of Jeffrey Sachs.
I think he's an honest person.
And he was appointed to study this, and he went into it thinking, well, probably came from nature like they always do.
And he studied it, and he became convinced, as you or I, he became thoroughly convinced that it came from the lab.
Yeah, well, let me ask you this, because we're running out of time, but this is...
A question I get every day, and I say if I'm elected president, the answer to that is yes.
But do you think these guys are ever going to get prosecuted?
I think it will require another president.
I don't think this attorney general is going to.
I've referred Anthony Fauci two times over a two-year period for criminal prosecution for the felony of lying to Congress.
And I've just redone it again today because we're doing a third letter because we have him in testimony telling Senator Marshall from Kansas that he has no knowledge of the grant of defuse.
I think that's going to be untrue because not only was his agency at the briefing, we've now learned that in the initial stages of diffuse that they were going to use the Rocky Mountain Lab, which is part of NAID. It's an in-house lab, and that they were actually part of the diffuse proposal.
So I find it very hard to believe that Fauci's never heard of the diffuse proposal until later on, and I think he's lied again.
But I think it's going to take a different perspective.
President, somebody that will appoint people that are free of conflicts to actually be in charge of this.
But I don't think this administration will prosecute any of them.
Well, you know, one of the things that was wonderful, it was so much darkness at that time during COVID. And the one thing I really looked forward to was those two or three times that you got Dr.
Fauci in front of Congress.
But your committee was dominated by the Democrats who were protecting him.
And so you would only get a couple of minutes for questions.
But I'm sure that you had questions afterwards.
You were thinking of things that you wish you had asked him.
Is that...
Yeah, and sometimes we submit them in writing, but we don't often get answers.
They just ignore us.
But I have to say, really, one of my favorite exchanges was we knew in advance we weren't supposed to use video.
And, of course, we did it anyway.
So we had the video of Anthony Fauci from 2004 when the mom calls in and says, my daughter's 14 and she's been sick with a dog for two weeks with the flu.
Yeah.
Now she's getting better.
Should I give her the flu vaccine?
And Anthony Fauci responds, this is before he became overly political.
He says, well, of course not.
She's been inoculated with the best inoculation you ever have, which is the virus.
If she's better now, she doesn't need a vaccine.
And so we played it for him before the Democrats object to it being played.
But it's like even that he can't sort of admit.
He's like, I wrote the chapter on immunology.
And I was like, well, you need to reread the chapter on immunology because you're not paying attention.
And it really did cost lives.
Irregardless of what you think about whether the vaccines work or not, we went a year with no vaccine at all.
So during that year, what could you do to help people?
There's several things.
Most of the deaths, half the deaths were in nursing homes.
You know what I would have done if I were Anthony Fauci?
I wouldn't have compelled anyone to do anything, but I would have given this bit of advice.
I would say, protect the elderly with people who have already had COVID and recovered.
So if I was in charge of the nursing homes, people were getting it right and left.
A lot of young people were getting it.
As soon as you were documented to get it and you had been better and you were two weeks out, I'd put you in charge of the elderly folks until I could populate everything.
I told this to Trump's detail and they didn't listen to me.
I told him, put the Secret Service people around him.
There's 2,000 Secret Service.
Put the young people who have already had COVID around him to protect him from getting it from other people.
So you could have used natural...
It's not perfect.
I mean, nothing's perfect.
But it would have been at least one weapon we could have used to try to protect those most vulnerable, and that was the elderly.
All right.
Well, Senator Paul, this is the book, Deception, the great COVID cover-up.
And who would publish the book?
Where can people find it?
It was published by Regnery, but Regnery is now owned by the publisher you're familiar with, which is Skyhorse.
Skyhorse.
And at Skyhorse, people can get it on Amazon or, you know, their local bookstore.
Yes, absolutely.
Right.
And are you still getting censored?
You know, I don't know, to tell you the truth.
I know that on this I have been.
And it became a bone of contention like with YouTube.
And so I just decided I don't need YouTube.
My stuff still gets all over YouTube, but I decided to put stuff on a competitor.
And that's one way the marketplace works.
And it's one thing that I think some people on the right misunderstand about this.
Look, do I hate YouTube and all of these big tech companies that censor me?
Yeah, I have great disagreements with them.
I would tell them it's incredibly illiberal.
It's the opposite of being liberal to restrict people's speech.
But I also don't believe that the government has the right to tell them they have to host my speech.
I have the ability to go other places.
Now, I don't like the government interacting with big tech to coerce them or to convince them to take on my speech.
So I don't like if you were with NBC News right now and afterwards you had to meet with the FBI. That's a chilling effect.
The FBI shouldn't be meeting with NBC News, but they also shouldn't be meeting with Twitter.
They shouldn't be meeting with YouTube.
So when the government is pushing the coercion, there is a First Amendment problem.
But I think it's important to know that we can't force them to take our opinion either.
And so that part of it isn't part of the First Amendment.
We don't always get everything we want.
And one of our ways to react is not buy their product or not use their product.
Senator Rand Paul, thank you so much for being with us today, but more importantly, thank you for your courage, for your integrity, and for your patriotism toward our country, and for being a light and a champion for the values that make this country important.
