Warning to Dr. Anthony Fauci: In January, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is set to become chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee — and he’s coming after you.
Paul, who has been at odds with Fauci since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, told the New York Post Wednesday that getting to the bottom of Covid-19 will be one of his top priorities as chairman.
“I chose to chair this committee over another because I believe that, for the health of our republic, Congress must stand up once again for its constitutional role,” Paul told the paper. “This committee’s mission of oversight and investigations is critical to Congress reasserting itself.”
“I think we’re on the cusp of, really, the beginning of uncovering what happened with Covid,” he added.
Friends in High Places
Paul, the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee for the last two years, has done his level best to ferret out the truth about the origins of the virus and the science — or lack thereof — behind Fauci’s ever-changing recommendations on such things as masking, social distancing, and school reopenings. But with the power of the chairmanship and, he hopes, an incoming administration less committed to the Fauci narrative, Paul believes he may finally be able to uncover the whole story.
“We are going to, hopefully, have a friendlier administration, and we’re hoping that there will be a friendly person at [the Department of Health and Human Services], and we’re hoping they’ll be friendly at [the National Institutes of Health (NIH)],” he said.
Assuming President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees to head these agencies are confirmed, Paul’s positive prognostication will probably prove prescient. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whom Trump nominated as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, is the author of The Real Anthony Fauci, a scathing attack on the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Trump is also said to be strongly considering naming Stanford University medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, author of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, director of the NIH. Both men were, at the Biden administration’s behest, censored on social media for their Covid views. It seems safe to assume that the two will cheerfully cooperate with Paul’s investigations.
Indeed, when it comes to censorship, they and Paul, another victim of Covid censorship, are simpatico. According to the Post, Paul “wants to ensure Americans are free to discuss such topics without fear of suppression by the government in tandem with social media companies.”
“The idea that the government would pre-emptively be telling people not to publish things, to me, is horrendous,” he said.
Going Viral
As to the virus itself, Paul’s main focus will be on its likely origin as a leak from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) along with the NIH’s funding of the research behind it.
“The biggest item of the Covid coverup is that for years, we’ve known there is this dangerous research,” he told the Post.
According to LifeSiteNews:
Paul recently told Fox News that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and HHS “have refused to turn over the documents as to why Wuhan got this research money and why it wasn’t screened as dangerous research. I’m looking forward to getting those (documents), mainly because we need to try to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“The cover-up went beyond public statements. Federal agencies and key officials withheld and continue to conceal crucial information from both Congress and the public,” Paul said in his opening remarks at a Senate hearing in June dedicated to COVID’s origins. “This has been a deliberate, prolonged effort to deceive the committee about certain gain-of-function research experiments that the agencies have been withholding. What we have found as we’ve gone through this is at every step there’s been resistance.”
Grouchy Fauci
Fauci was among the prime resisters. He steadfastly maintained that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the” WIV, as he put it in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee in May 2021. When, during another hearing two months later, Paul gave him the opportunity to retract his statement, Fauci instead accused Paul of being a liar.
By that October, the jig was up. In a letter to Representative James Comer (R-Ky.), ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak confessed that the NIH had funded gain-of-function research (without using that exact term) at the WIV via a grant to EcoHealth Alliance.
Paul’s immediate Twitter response: “‘I told you so’ doesn’t even begin to cover it here.”
The senator’s Twitter/X wit remains as sharp as ever. After a Kennedy parody account posted Friday, “Dear Dr. Fauci, I’m still looking for you!” Paul reposted it with the quip, “I bet we find him.”
The Post reported that Paul said his “next priority is overseeing border security.” He wants Trump to immediately deport all illegal aliens who are convicted criminals and to reinstate his policy of making asylum seekers stay in Mexico until their cases have been decided.
Paul told the newspaper that his “ultimate goal over the next two years is promoting openness in places that have been most resistant to it.”
“We’re just scratching at the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “Most of the [documents] we’ve been trying to get so far are non-classified. You can imagine what may be happening in our government or other governments.”
