Senator Rand Paul Exposes the Great COVID Coverup
2023-11-20 · Guest: Rand Paul (US Senator) · 25:46
Rand Paul on the COVID-19 origin coverup
Bob Zadek interviews Senator Rand Paul about his book Deception: The Great COVID Coverup, which details the alleged conspiracy by government officials to hide the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. They discuss the role of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the funding of “gain of function” research in Wuhan, and the coordinated effort to suppress the lab-leak theory to protect the “business of science.”
Topics: COVID-19, Gain of Function Research, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Lab Leak Theory, NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, Government Transparency, Deception
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Senator Rand Paul
Introduction and the George Carlin Quote [00:00]
Senator Rand Paul: It was the outright lies that got me intrigued. And the book exposes that this coverup extends to eight different agencies in government and hundreds of people. People say, “Well, how could hundreds of people—surely that doesn’t make any sense. A conspiracy involving hundreds of people couldn’t be true.”
Well, I think the best explanation is the way George Carlin put it about this. He said a conspiracy theory isn’t necessarily where interests converge. I think over time, the idea that they could share guilt or culpability for millions of deaths is a big incentive for them to cover up.
Bob Zadek Introduces Senator Rand Paul [00:33]
Bob Zadek: Hello friends, this is Bob Zadek, host of The Bob Zadek Show podcast. Although we have all recovered from the medical effects of COVID, we may never recover from the political effects of our government’s concealing the truth. As Senator Rand Paul reveals in his new book, Deception: The Great COVID Coverup, you will now hear from my recent interview with the Senator how widespread the deception was and how many instruments of government and of the private sector were collectively involved.
Rather than coming clean, the likes of Dr. Fauci led a massive coverup to avoid accepting responsibility. All of us deserve to know the truth. The mainstream media continues to be useless. It’s time to wake up and rein in the overreach of federal, state, and local governments. We must ensure they never again abuse powers as they did during the pandemic. Listen to Senator Paul’s own words in summing up what you will learn from the book.
Senator Paul, thank you so much for writing your book, Deception, and thank you for joining me this morning.
Senator Rand Paul: Thank you, Bob. Thanks for having me.
The Scope of the Deception [01:41]
Bob Zadek: Your book reads as if there was some committee established, like with the Kennedy assassination. There were these blue-ribbon committees that were put together to get to the bottom of things—the Challenger disaster. But your book reads like the result of an enormous staff of blue-ribbon committee members and their staffers publishing all this. And yet you took it upon yourself to put all of this data before the public. And it’s essential reading because the public doesn’t have any other source to learn what happened.
We all lived through it, and we all are still scratching our heads days—what did we just go through and how did it happen? And your book supplies those answers. Now, Senator Paul, you were laboring in the Senate publicly and privately, and you seemed to have had—or you seem to have focused on Dr. Fauci as the target. He was your foil. He was, if one were to accumulate and listen to all of the clips and all of the publications and all of the media, we saw constantly you were focusing on Dr. Fauci as if he were sort of a ringleader of sorts.
So, introduce us to the book. Who was the deceptor and who were being deceived in the book Deception?
From Trust to Suspicion: The Fauci Emails [03:21]
Senator Rand Paul: You know, in the beginning, I trusted Anthony Fauci. When I first heard from him, I’d never knew who he was. I thought, you know, he’s a disinterested scientist and he’s probably just telling the truth. He said that the virus likely came from animals. I saw that in the news. I really didn’t think a lot about it for almost a year until I read an article by Nicholas Wade talking about how everything they were saying in private, they were not saying in public.
So in private, they were alarmed. They were saying, “Oh my goodness, it looks like the virus has been manipulated in the lab.” And in Anthony Fauci’s own words, he says, “We’re concerned because we know they do gain of function research in this lab.” But then we fast forward about a year later, and in committee, I directly asked Anthony Fauci, “Did you fund—did the NIH fund gain of function research in Wuhan?” And he responds, “We’ve never, ever funded gain of function research in Wuhan.”
And so it was the outright lies that got me intrigued. But as I delved more and more into this, I discovered that the coverup really began at a specific time. And as you read these emails that a federal judge ordered to be released beginning January 31st, 2020, you can feel the tension. You can feel the hysteria building. The emails begin at 10:30 at night and go till 3:00 in the morning. You can sense that Anthony Fauci can’t get to sleep because he’s worried about this.
His assistants are sending him emails saying, “This is a research project and we funded it, but it can’t be gain of function because it didn’t go before the safety committee.” At 3:00 in the morning, he sends an email to some guy I’d never heard of, and a year later I discover that person was head of the safety committee. But he’s saying nothing to see here. It came from animals. It couldn’t have come from the lab.
But what he’s doing is beginning the coverup. And the book exposes that this coverup extends to eight different agencies in government and hundreds of people. And they’ve been doing it for a decade. They all are suspicious that the virus came from the lab from money they gave. So they all independently have the same self-interest in trying to cover up the fact that the US funded this.
So it’s a conspiracy involving hundreds, but they didn’t necessarily act together, but they all participated in funding research in a lab that was dangerous, that ultimately leaked to the public. The book goes through an array of evidence as to why this didn’t come from animals and there is no evidence that it came from animals, and then there’s hundreds of bits of data that point towards the fact that this came from a lab in Wuhan.
The “Burner Phone” and the Business of Science [06:39]
Bob Zadek: Now, you said just a moment ago, “they” were exchanging emails back and forth. To give us a sense of the scope, who is the “they”? I’m not asking especially for names, but what groups, what segments of the public and private sector were included in the “they”? And also, Senator, if you would, you used the phrase that we have been hearing—that we were hearing every day for three years, but the public has a short memory. Explain in a few words, if you can, this “gain of function” concept, because that’s a word that you and I know quite well; the public may not know what that means in this context.
Senator Rand Paul: The initial conspiracy and the initial conversations, the initial exchange of emails is between Anthony Fauci and leading virologists and grant disposers of money—people who are disposing grants to people. One of the key people, though, does have a name, and his name is Jeremy Farrar in England. He’s the head of an organization—he’s essentially the Anthony Fauci of England.
Interestingly, when he describes this period of time, he says, “I bought a burner phone for the first time.” That doesn’t sound like someone that’s a public servant. That sounds like someone who’s conspiring to conceal things. His wife says he has 17 conversations in one day and that she advises him—this is his revelation—she advises him to speak to his family as if they may be his last words, to inform them of the information he knows in case he doesn’t survive.
What is that an implication of? That’s an implication there’s something big here, but he never really gets to it in his book. He talks about he might die, he has a burner phone, he’s giving his last will and testament, but he doesn’t really make clear who he’s afraid of. To me, it’s—I think he’s afraid of basically the Chinese government. He believes this came—or his own government, I don’t know. But the thing is, is he’s acknowledging that this came from China.
The four or five other virologists on the call all have looked at the genetic sequence and they say, “This is suspicious and doesn’t happen in nature.” It has a special cleavage site which allows it to enter into the human cells that doesn’t exist in this family of coronaviruses in nature. So they’re all very suspicious. But this goes on for about four or five days only. From February 1st till February 4th.
By February 4th, they’re all publicly saying that you’re a nut or a kook or a conspiracy theorist if you believe this. They’re signing letters to Lancet. They put an article in Nature that is edited by Anthony Fauci. At this same period of time, Anthony Fauci goes to the lectern in the White House and quotes a paper to prove that this could only come from animals, but he wrote the paper. He’s quoting himself. He edited and oversaw and organized this paper.
The people, the scientist who said nothing to see here, this is a conspiracy—the person who wrote that letter was the head of a group called EcoHealth Alliance, who funded the research in China. They’re all interconnected. They’re all self-interested. They’re all conflicted in interest. And nobody’s admitting in public what they’re saying in private is that they actually believe it came from the lab.
Bob Zadek: So the original sin was the first time one in this group said, “Oh my goodness, I may have contributed to this.” The fear was the public would discover that our government funded, in part, the research that put all of this in motion where ultimately a mistake was made in a lab—no suggestion it was done as an attack, but it happened—and Fauci and others were in the first instance determined to sever any possible connection between them and the occurrence. So they were focusing on that rather than on “what do we do about it?” Is that a fair summary?
Senator Rand Paul: Yes, it’s initially fear of culpability. Fear and guilt that they funded something that killed millions of people. Now, they didn’t yet know it was going to kill millions of people. So it’s fear and culpability, but they also were worried about—they call it science. I call it the business of science. They’re worried about the millions of dollars and billions of dollars that change hand funding this type of research.
They’re worried about it damaging relations with China. They’re worried about all the money changing hands back and forth. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, sends an email to Anthony Fauci and says, “This won’t be good for science.” And they imply as if they are fully supportive of sort of the Platonic lie or the noble lie that the common people—we can’t really tell them the truth about where this came from because it’ll damage their support ultimately for gain of function research.
Defining Gain of Function Research [10:55]
Senator Rand Paul: And you asked the definition of this. Gain of function research is where you take a virus or the genetics from a virus and you take another virus, the genetics for it, you combine them together into a brand new virus. They call it a chimeric virus. It’s a virus that now has consisted of two different viruses, but you test it and you say, “Hmm, wonder if it would be more infectious or more deadly in humans.”
But then they purposely mutate it. For example, the most famous experiment doing this was in 2010, and everybody—alarm bells went off. A guy took the avian flu, which is very contagious among chickens—and when you read about millions of chickens being killed in China, it’s from the avian flu—is not very contagious to humans, but if it gets in humans, it has a 50% mortality. He said, “I wonder what it would be like if I could mutate the avian flu and make it more easily transmissible among mammals and through the air, to make it aerosolized.”
This is sort of a death wish. This is sort of like your crazy teenager scientist with a mad scientist kit deciding, “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to create a virus?”
Gain of Function and the “Noble Lie” [12:00]
Rand Paul: If it might kill everyone, then I’ll be careful not to let it leak. But this is what’s been going on is gain-of-function research. They’ve been doing it for a decade, and there’s been a real debate in the scientific community. There are significantly credentialed and tenured professors at some of our most prestigious schools who think it’s a bad idea. And then there’s Anthony Fauci, who thinks it’s a good idea.
Bob Zadek: Now, so we have an initial mistake, and this is classic. This is classic. We have a mistake, a bad act, not necessarily criminal, and then we have the cover-up. So this is, again, classic. The cover-up is in the news, and that’s where your attention went, trying to uncover the cover-up. Now, why was there—once they were off to the races with the cover-up—why were they so aggressive in suppressing any information to the contrary? What was in their ethos that they were determined to have government-speak dictate what was going on, and why were they so aggressive in suppressing other opinions?
Rand Paul: I think over time, the idea that they could share guilt or culpability for millions of deaths is a big incentive for them to cover up. But I think initially, the bigger incentive before millions of people had died, the bigger incentive was that they philosophically believed that we need to have good relations with China and that it would damage relations with China, and it would damage a decade of developing this interaction of the scientific community with China.
And they’re not averse—these are people who are not averse to telling the “noble lie.” A good example of the noble lie is Anthony Fauci’s had all these different opinions on masks. But when he finally says, “Oh, you know, they don’t work in public,” or “They do work in public,” he was really saying to people—he didn’t want them to buy the masks that would actually be in shortage for healthcare. So he was sort of—they didn’t work to begin with, they did work.
In the end, though, if you really want to know the truth from most of these people, it’s what they say in private. When Anthony Fauci was asked in private by a colleague that was going to travel in February 2020, he says, “Don’t use them. We’ve known for decades that masks don’t work in public, and for public health, they do not prevent the passage of viruses.”
The Abuse of Emergency Powers [14:40]
Bob Zadek: There’s so much we could learn about government. If you could speak to the use of emergency powers—I can’t even say those two words without getting enraged. And you explain how the executive branch, state and local, became intoxicated with this discovery of all the wonderful things they can do through executive powers. If you could just give us your view from the top on the uses and abuses of executive powers and how the heck did we get there?
Rand Paul: Virtually everything that happened during the lockdown, virtually every enforcement of the lockdown, either federal or state-based, was an abuse of emergency powers. Emergency powers are essentially extra-constitutional because the thing is, the Constitution says that legislatures, both state and federal legislatures, pass law, not executives. Executives administer the laws. So this was always a usurpation of power.
Now, it’s been going on a long time, really since the Great Depression on, we’ve given more and more emergency powers. In fact, in the 1930s, we gave the president the power to shut down all communications in the country. Many people think that this now applies to the internet, radio, television, everything—things that didn’t maybe even exist back then. But some people have called this the “internet kill switch,” that the president could turn off the internet with the flick of the switch. I’ve tried to remove these powers. I’ve tried to stop these emergency powers.
At the state level, in my state in particular, my governor actually forbade the attendance of church, forbade you to go to a gym, forbade you to go to a hotel, to a restaurant, forbade you to travel without papers, forbade you to travel without vaccines. And every time, he was ultimately struck down by the court. Every one of his edicts—fortunately, there’s enough people left in the federal courts that they struck him down.
But ultimately, we had to fix it at our state legislature. These emergency powers need to be taken away. So at our state legislature, we finally said that emergency edicts by the governor expire within 30 days unless approved by the legislature. Now, I would have made it even shorter. I would have probably said three days. But these emergency powers are dangerous. And if you ever get a president that loses any kind of sense of self-awareness or restraint, you could have a president that could rule the United States by edict just with the stuff that’s on the books now.
Natural Immunity and “Herd Medicine” [17:09]
Bob Zadek: You spent a fair amount of time in your book discussing how aggressive Fauci et al. was in suppressing any discussion of the benefit of natural immunity. In other words, “There’s nothing here to look at. We’ll get better, our bodies will take care of it without government.” If you could just comment on your discussion on natural immunity and why was government so afraid of it? It’s good, not bad.
Rand Paul: Yeah, at one point Anthony Fauci says to Francis Collins in an email, “We need to do a takedown, a takedown of these scientists who are talking about natural immunity.” This was the epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, who issued the Great Barrington Declaration talking about natural immunity, trying to work hard to save the people most at risk for this disease. But they didn’t want to mention natural immunity because they didn’t want to deter anybody from being vaccinated.
But the problem is, is when you’re dishonest with people, they tend to doubt everything you tell them. So they would come to me and they would accuse people like me of spreading vaccine hesitancy. And I would say, “No, no, I’m not telling people not to get vaccinated. I’m telling people who are at risk that they should get vaccinated. But what I’m not doing is telling a six-month-old they need to be vaccinated because that’s a lie. Children don’t die from this disease.”
In fact, as the statistics came in, we found that zero healthy children—not a handful, not 1%, not 10%—zero healthy children died from this. Now, some children died in the United States, about 140. They were all, unfortunately, dying from other diseases and they died with COVID. But we finally badgered them and badgered them, and the CDC released a study. It was a million people in California and New York who they’d accumulated through government statistics, and they found out that those who had not been vaccinated but who had gotten the disease were actually—had protection that was twice as good as being vaccinated.
And the idiots on the left said, “Well, you’re telling people just to get sick and die, and if they don’t die, they have immunity.” I said, “No, I’m not. I’m just telling people they’re going to get sick one way or another, whether they’ve been vaccinated. What’s the truth of the matter?” They still will not release—they have the data for the whole U.S. A lot of people over 65, 97% of the people got two vaccines. I’m fine with that. They got two vaccines. But now they’ve been infected also. Now they’ve been infected twice. What does it mean to have natural immunity plus vaccine immunity? I suspect that the chance of going to the hospital or dying, if you don’t have a significant health problem, no matter what age you are, if you’ve been vaccinated and you’ve been infected, may approach zero.
But they need to tell us that. Instead, they’re hawking a vaccine. They’re telling you, “Oh, this new one you need to take.” Well, there is a real question. You now have immunity, but the vaccine has mutated and mutated and mutated such that it’s no longer as deadly. It was much more deadly in 2020. But the only way we can make rational decisions is if they give us information. But it makes me believe, when they won’t give you the information, that actually they’re in cahoots with just selling vaccines. They’ve become salesmen for these billion-dollar companies. They’re buying up the extra, you know, they’re out there advertising every day, “Oh,” and lamenting that moms will not vaccinate their one and two-year-olds, which I think is malpractice to vaccinate young people for this because there are some risks from the vaccine for young people.
And the risks for the vaccine for young people outweigh the benefits. Now, I would say the opposite if you’re significantly overweight or if you’re older, at least in 2020 or 2021. The benefits of the vaccine, I think, outweighed the disaster of the disease. But we used to treat people individually in medicine. It was an individual assessment based on your age, based on your health. And instead, what we’re getting is one-size-fits-all, and it all seems to be to the benefit of billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies.
Bob Zadek: It sounds like something which I remember reading about about a decade ago, and it scared the heck out of me. It was called “herd medicine.” And the medical schools were promoting an approach to medicine which was sacrifice the individual for the good of the group. In other words, the individual patient stopped mattering, just as you have said.
The Threat of Future Lab Leaks [21:53]
Bob Zadek: Now, Senator Paul, in respect of your time constraints, what is the lesson you hope your readers will get from the book that will make us better, more informed participants in the political process? What should we look for when we vote, when we read, when we make our selection at the ballot box? What are the warning signs we should be alert for?
Rand Paul: I think the number one point I want to get across is that we are still at risk for this happening again, for another leak of another lab, another leak of a virus, but there could be one much more dangerous. In the book, I quote a scientist, a long-standing virologist, who believes that the next leak could be much worse. It might have a mortality of 5% to 50%.
There are viruses they’re experimenting with that we pay for through tax money—Marburg virus, Nipah virus, Ebola. They have 50% mortality. What kind of crazy person would think it would be a good idea to take tax money and see if we can make these viruses more transmissible? So this is something I’m going to try to get legislation, if I can ever get Democrats to care at all about this issue.
To me, this is as important or more important than nuclear arms control, because as many people can die from this as die from a nuclear bomb. So the same way we should be talking to China and Russia and North Korea about nuclear weapons, we need to be talking not only to our Congress and our people about limiting this—right now, you can order online DNA to create the polio virus. You can create it from nothing. We actually can sort of create life in a way. A virus isn’t necessarily life because a virus has to live in a living cell. But you can create polio online.
There’s a real danger if we are getting to the point where people are creating Ebola and making it worse online and then releasing it. We’ve got enough crazy people doing crazy things in our country. The taxpayers shouldn’t be supporting that. So my goal is to have legislation in the end that we can interest Democrats in, pass bipartisan, and try to make sure we’re not continuing to do this dangerous category of research in the U.S.
Fighting the Battle Alone [23:37]
Bob Zadek: Now, Senator Paul, one last question. Why, if you can share your opinion if you have one, why were you fighting this battle alone? You were doing God’s work. This was so important. And without you, there would be nobody doing it. It seems like nobody—the entire—
Partisan Divide and Closing Thoughts [24:00]
Bob Zadek: House of Congress, both houses should have been full-throated support. Why were you doing it alone?
Rand Paul: Well, we’ll have to conclude it here, but what I would say is that the other side, the Democrats, tend to be defenders of all things government. They believe that government and Big Brother is always helpful, always harmonious, always philanthropic, and they don’t want to criticize parts of government because they see it as a criticism of their philosophy. But it is shocking that none of them have really been interested in this, and we have tried over and over again, but it’s still to this day, there is almost no Democrat support or interest in what happened to the virus. I don’t think it’s over, though. Public opinion has shifted, and my hope is still to interest Democrats in this, and I’m going to continue trying and I’m going to see what I can do to try to change this and change this throughout the country. But thank you very much for having me.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Senator Paul, and thank you to my friends for listening to my interview. I hope Senator Paul’s revelations shock you awake as much as they did me. Buy his book, Deception, and share it with everyone you know. The truth depends upon us spreading the word.
This is Bob Zadek, signing off for now. Stay vigilant, and remember the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin, that those who would give up liberty to obtain a little security deserve neither liberty nor security. Also enjoy my podcast archives at bobzadek.com, where you will hear hundreds of my past interviews with leading libertarian thinkers who, like Senator Paul, are committed to uncovering the truth.