It’s Way Past Due That Rand Paul Quit His COVID-19 Crusade

The shebeen's Five Minute Rule regarding any public utterance of any member of the Paul family was temporarily suspended on Wednesday. Rand Paul brought an alleged whistleblower from the CIA named James Erdman III to testify in his relentless pursuit of Dr. Anthony Fauci for ... something-something, gain-of-function, something, perjury, something. Paul is absolutely blind in his desire to prove that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab in China and that it did not originate in a wet market there.

Further, Paul believes there was a government-wide cover-up of these facts. Why this should matter remains a mystery. The origins of the virus do not affect the public health aspect of the pandemic in any way, and it would not have had an impact on the prophylactic response to the pandemic from the public health community.

Ah, but there is the rub. Paul has cast himself as the Ahab of the bloodstream to cast doubt on the all the admittedly inconvenient precautions taken against the pandemic. And, I suspect, he wants to sow chaos in the country's public health system by sowing doubts about the public health experts and scientists who fought the virus. This became obvious from Paul's opening remarks as the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Today, the committee will hear from an intelligence community whistleblower about these questions. The witness will testify that the CIA scientific analysts repeatedly concluded that a laboratory leak was the most likely origin of COVID-19. And that those conclusions were buried, softened, or withheld from Congress while the public was told to trust a different story. For years, Americans were told to trust the experts, trust the agencies, trust the intelligence community, and trust the officials who assured us that they were following the science. But the evidence before the committee tells a very different story. Today we will expose a system in which a small circle of officials, scientists, grantees, and intelligence advisers move from agency to agency, meeting to meeting, briefing to briefing, reviewing one another's work.

Thar she blows!

At the center of the government's side of the circle was Dr. Anthony Fauci. For years, Dr. Fauci was not merely a public health official speaking from the NIH. He had a long-standing relationship with the National Security and Intelligence apparatus on biological threats, dangerous pathogens, classified life sciences researches, pandemic preparedness, and COVID origins. Again and again, documents show him being brought into national security discussions far beyond ordinary public health messaging. During COVID, intelligence officials arranged for Dr. Fauci to review highly classified intelligence assessments that could not even be sent outside the White House complex. But how can Anthony Fauci objectively comment on a discussion of COVID origins when he approved the very funding that may have caused the pandemic virus?

Dozens of times, he referred to the idea that the pandemic originating in the lab was a conspiracy, that it was a conspiracy theory. Dr. Fauci convened the now infamous February 1st, 2020 call. Some scientists on that call privately raised serious concerns about a laboratory origin. Yet ironically those same scientists later co-authored the proximal origin paper which publicly dismissed the lab leak hypothesis. One author received a $9 million grant from Dr. Fauci's own agency after he changed his opinion from lab leak on the private phone call to natural origin in public. At the same time, Dr. Fauci coordinated with the National Academies on Coronavirus origins and Public facing messaging. These were not independent experts reaching a consensus. They were part of the same machine designed to reach the same conclusion.

"May have" caused the virus?

Paul's case was so fringe-y that no Democratic senator showed up to contest it, which occasioned more than a little show-pony whining from the Republicans who did.

For his part, Erdman looked like someone who would rather be anywhere else than answering questions from the likes of Senator Aqua Buddha. He was a cautious man who had been hauled into a private circus.

PAUL: Mr. Erdman. Is it your testimony that there is still resistance from the CIA to comply with the law we passed to declassify all the COVID information? Yes. One of the things that I think is new today that I'm hearing from your testimony is that from an early period of time, You believe and the information you're aware of is that CIA scientists from an early time after the pandemic began, 2020, 2021 were concluding that the lab leak was the most likely hypothesis.

ERDMAN: Uh, yes, Senator. I, I'd like to offer some qualifications on that as well. Um, a lot of the, the issues, um, occurred at the interagency space, uh, at the National Intelligence Council, the individuals responsible for, uh, conducting, uh, or, or writing WMD analysis. So, and many of those individuals are on JDA from the CIA. But yes, very early, as early as 2020, there were agencies within the IC circulating papers that said, hey, there's, for example, DOE circulated a paper in May of 2020 that said that all the conditions were present for a lab leak, and I could go through the timeline, but yes, my short answer is yes, periodically throughout 2020 all the way to 2024.

The only amusement came while Erdman was being questioned by Senator Ron (Shreds of Freedom) Johnson. Erdman's testimony was interrupted when Johnson read a letter from CIA public affairs director Liz Lyons:

The committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an agency officer for testimony today without notifying CIA. Despite having already obtained closed-door testimony from the individual previously, the witness testifying today is not appearing as a whistleblower in pursuit of the truth, but instead in response to the subpoena issued by Chairman Paul. This proceeding amounts to nothing more than a dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing, as the CIA has already assessed COVID-19 most likely originated from the lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.

And with that, the snipes flew away, unharmed and cackling.