 Welcome to the Reason Stream. I'm Zach Weismiller, joined today by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has a new book out called Deception, The Great COVID Cover-Up. Senator Paul, thanks for joining me today. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me. A central question in your book is, did the US government fund research in Wuhan that directly led to the COVID-19 pandemic? How strong do you think the evidence for that is at this point? When I first heard about the debate or the debate began in spring of 2020, I assumed that the scientists were being honest with us that previously pandemics had started in animals and been transmitted to humans. The first SARS epidemic was 2002-2003. It came from civet cats. They found the cats. They found that the handlers had antibodies. Then a group of scientists in the spring of 2020 said, this is what happened. I really didn't pay much attention to it, but gradually over about a year's time, particularly reading Nicholas Wade's article on Medium and other articles about this. Alina Chan's work and her book Virality. As I began looking at this, the evidence, I think, was very, very strong that it came from a lab. First of all, they checked 80,000 animals in China and found no animals that had the virus. They checked the blood of the people who handled the animals to see if they had antibodies to the virus. That didn't occur either. They also looked at the genetic diversity of the original people that were getting ill. If a virus is coming from animals, it usually tries to take multiple leaps because it's not very contagious in the beginning and so you have multiple different genetic varieties from the get-go. This one seemed to have a single source and a single genetic variety, very homogenous. Most people think that that also adds strength to the argument that it came from the lab. So the evidence really, as I began to look at it, looked as if it probably came from the lab. Then we found evidence that Anthony Fauci and the other scientists weren't being honest with us, that they were saying in private exactly what I was beginning to conclude. And that's that the virus, the evidence looked like the virus was manipulated and that they were very concerned because they do gain of function research in that lab. But in public they were still telling me and Fauci responded angrily to me that the NIH never funded gain of function research in Wuhan. It turns out in private though, he was saying the opposite. He was acknowledging that it happened and that they had indeed funded it. So these things began to add up and but in particular the conversations that the scientists were saying one thing privately and saying another publicly is really got me involved, intrigued in this issue and really motivated me to bring it all together into this book. I'd like to play a clip of one of your famous exchanges with Anthony Fauci from July 2021 where you're asking him to correct the record after he denied the government ever funded gain of function research. Let's roll that. Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain of function research in Wuhan? Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you're referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function. What was let me finish. You take an animal virus and you increase its visibility to humans. You're saying that's not gain of function. That is correct. And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about. Quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about. What are your reflections on that knowing what you know now? Well, it's a great clip in the sense that his response is that his experts at the NIH have judged this up and down the chain have judged this not to be gain of function research. Well, this is very intriguing. So what we have been requesting for two years is the discussion. If his scientists discussed and debated and concluded that this was not gain of function research, let us see the deliberations. So one of two things are possible. Either he's overstating the case and deliberations never took place or the deliberations took place and aren't quite as clear cut as he's making it. And so far the NIH has refused to reveal any of these documents. So these are not classified documents but still the NIH is more secretive at this point than the CIA. We can't get NIH documents or HHS documents. We get there are several different articles or descriptions of discussions that we want. We have the name of them. They send it to us and it'll be 250 pages long all redacted. So it's making it impossible for us to assess the truth to have oversight but it's also impossible for us to fix the problem if they don't let us examine what happened this time around. You know, there was a redacted email that really made me start to consider the level of deception that might be at play here. It was this February 2020 email that Fauci sent. You'll see it there on the left side of the screen. The redacted version in the House Committee was able to get it unredacted. And if you zoom in on this highlighted portion of the unredacted email, this was with his kind of inner circle of scientists talking about this phone call where they all agreed they were concerned early on that this was a lab leak. And that concern was heightened by the fact they say that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments and further research has found these papers like this one, this 2017 paper, Discovery of a Rich Pool of Bat-Sars-related Coronaviruses. This was a collaboration between the Wuhan Lab and Peter Deshex EcoHealth Alliance and was funded by an NIH grant. And the highlights here just show that basically they created a bunch of artificial viruses by combining eight different Bat-Sars coronaviruses with the WIV1 backbone. And then those viruses replicated efficiently in human cells. So I guess the question I have there is it's clear in your book that you believe there's likely a level of deception here. If that proves to be true, what sort of consequences should there be? You know it's a crime, it's a felony to lie to Congress. It's punishable up to five years in prison. After we determined that Fauci did lie to Congress, that indeed he had funded gain-of-function research, we submitted the evidence to the Attorney General, to Merrick Garland. But unfortunately he's not done anything with it. A year later when more evidence accrued, we referred him again for criminal prosecution and yet nothing has done. But the thing is is that everything that he's saying there in private, in that email, he's basically admitting it was gain-of-function. He knows that they funded it. He knows that the virus looks manipulated. And yet at the same time he was saying that, this is essentially February 1st of 2020. Four days later he commissions an article to be written in a journal by his cohorts. One of the main ones was Christian Anderson. In private, Christian Anderson is saying, this is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a fringe theory. In fact, it may be the most likely theory that the virus came from a lab. In the paper that they publish at Anthony Fauci's behest, they say explicitly that a lab-constructed virus is not a plausible idea at all. Not even plausible. Not really to them virtually possible. They in fact conclude in the abstract of that paper that COVID is not a laboratory construct. Not that it probably isn't. It is not a laboratory construct. Meanwhile, saying privately, they think it's most likely. We have several of these scientists saying, I'm 80, 20, 80% lab, 20% nature. You know, 50, 50 some of them are saying. Meanwhile, in public, they're acting with surety. They're acting with complete confidence. But really what they're doing is issuing a nothing to see here notice. It's a cover your ass. Basically, they don't want people to draw the linkage because they know they're responsible for funding this research and that ultimately culpability for the pandemic will attach to them. So it is a huge cover up. Not just Anthony Fauci, but throughout government. Eight different departments of government were funding this type of research and that's just the non-classified. We think there's still more to be found. One of the research papers that was leaked by a whistleblower is from 2018. Where Dr. Shi from Wuhan, Dr. Barrett from UNC, and Dr. Peter Dezak for EcoHealth were asking for money and they wanted to take a coronavirus and insert a special cleavage site into it that makes it more infectious in humans. It's called a furan cleavage site. Well, that one didn't get funded, but that's exactly what COVID is, is a coronavirus with a human cleavage site in it that's never been seen in nature. And yet when they saw COVID, you'd think if you were one of the people on that grant, you would have immediately called Anthony Fauci and said, holy cow, this new virus has the same sequence as the same grant they were looking for in 2018 that we were going to help them with. Beware, this is more evidence. And yet nobody told the public this. If they told Anthony Fauci, he suppressed it and we only found out about it not from records releases, but from a whistleblower who actually came forward and gave us this information. This is the real problem. There's this enormous cover-up within government and we still have to have the information come out because Democrats still need to be convinced that there is a problem that we need to do something about gain of function research to try to prevent this kind of accident from happening again. That whistleblower is U.S. Marine major Joseph Murphy and you write at length about his report. He is talking about this diffuse proposal to insert the furan cleavage site which is mentioned was not ultimately funded but that doesn't mean that the research never happened. And what he says in his report is that first of all the documents were actually hidden from the relevant folder until someone replaced them after you grilled Fauci in 2021 and he summarizes their proposal is basically an effort to inoculate bats by circulating an airborne universal coronavirus vaccine in their caves. And even though DARPA rejected it for violating gain of function he hypothesizes that that work might have continued in the Wuhan lab and that SARS-CoV-2 might have been a precursor to that vaccine that escaped the lab. The best theory is that the Chinese created a virus COVID in order to try to create a vaccine to oppose it to try to see if they create a vaccine that would work for all coronaviruses. The person who was working on these vaccines we know his name a general Zo Euston and he's developing this vaccine sometime in 2019 but he has to have somebody develop a mutant coronavirus that actually infects humans well. We think that's what COVID was was developed in the lab to create the vaccine. We also know that Zo Euston got a vaccine and he has it created by February of 2020 and most people think there's no way you could have gotten it that quickly unless you'd been working on it for some time. We also know that this general dies mysteriously two months later. So there's a lot to be said here that what was going on is a creation of a virus creating a gain of function coronavirus that would infect humans easily and then creating a vaccine from that and what happened is that it accidentally got out of the lab. We also actually know the names of the three scientists who got sick in November of 2019. There we actually know the name. Some people say these are out of the patient zero and they got sick in 2019 November and yet the Chinese didn't admit to anything going on till January and even in January, second week of January the Chinese are still saying oh nothing to see here we don't think it's transmittable between humans. Meanwhile it's been cooking and growing for three months and they knew that wasn't true. How should science funding in this country change given the facts we've learned through this discovery? You know this debate's been going on a long time. Some scientists engineered avian flu and made it transmittable through the air among mammals and people were very concerned because avian flu is very deadly in humans but fortunately doesn't infect humans very easily. So they had a big debate and they shut down gain of function research between 2014 and 2016. The only problem was Anthony Fauci kept giving exemptions to all the people that were doing this research and then in 2017 the pause on gain of function funding expires and they set up a new committee a pandemic pathogen committee that's supposed to review things for safety. Well all those things sound good but then none of the Wuhan research ever went before the committee. In fact the committee, the chair of the committee told me they only looked at three projects out of probably possibly hundreds of these gain of function grants that they were looking at. So what you end up having to have is I think you probably need a committee of scientists as well as people in the national security theater who are aware of what kind of weapons can be made from these viruses. You need them looking at it and trying to decide whether the taxpayers should fund this. I think rather than a blanket ban of just saying no gain of function. The problem is if you say no gain of function Anthony Fauci already says all of these experiments which were obviously gain of function were not so he just defines himself out of the rules and I think they'll continue to do that but I think you need a committee and the other thing about the committee is it has to be independent they have to be able to review any grant throughout government and they also can't be the same people getting the money. So for example this Christian Anderson who does Fauci's bidding to write a paper saying nothing to see here he got a nine million dollar grant for the next month. So you can't have the people involved with determining whether something safe also be getting grants from the people that are judging the safety of. You can't that's too incestuous to be a real oversight condition but we think it can be done our hope still is that we can get a bipartisan bill out of this we continue to work try to work with Democrats every day to get them interested in the issue the hardest part is just the lack of curiosity the Democrats haven't really cared much about this a million Americans died and Democrats seem to be blasé about doing anything about it. You also suggest in the book some sorts of controls over the actual materials that are used in labs to manipulate viruses or bacterias or you know other life forms and you know we're in the synthetic biology age now and in some sense like the the gatekeeping is gone and it I just wonder like how do you think about the trade-offs there in terms of not stifling scientific progress while at the same time making sure we don't have rogue groups creating super viruses that cause a global pandemic. You know most research goes to universities and through grant agencies giving to the universities and so I think that can be policed through some sort of safety committee application of judging what is safe and what is not safe but we live in an era you're right an era of synthetic biology you can order on the internet the RNA to create the polio virus you can literally get on the internet right now and order the bits of it if you know how to put it together you can create the polio virus from nothing it's almost as if you're creating life now a virus may not really be life because it has to live in a living cell but essentially you're creating something that you can put into and basically bring alive from nothing so I think there should be some rules on ordering this you know we don't let you buy centrifuges online we don't let you enrich uranium in your basement this is I think equivalent to nuclear weapons and how many people can die from this and so even being a libertarian and not believing in many government rules this is one of the exceptions that I think government could participate in the other thing is is since government funds so much of this even as a libertarian there's no real restriction on how much you want to regulate government or regulate the expenditure of government funds so I think there needs to be a great deal more done to this and probably 95 to 99% of it will be government funds that need to be regulated more strictly last thing before I let you go you know what one of the major frustrations throughout this entire ordeals the way that speech was suppressed during the pandemic I know you experienced it yourself you were kicked off YouTube for your comments about masks and we now know thanks to the twitter files the FBI paid about 3.4 million dollars to twitter between October 2019 February 2021 for its efforts to comply with their information requests and you recently asked FBI director Christopher Wray about that Director Wray did the FBI pay twitter money to moderate content moderation I'm not aware of us paying money to moderate content there or anywhere else what was the three million dollars for that the FBI gave that's been revealed in twitter files then when it comes to payments going back well over four decades when we are required by federal law when a company like in this instance a provider goes through expenses to produce information we're required to reimburse them for those expenses and so I think that a lot of the questions about payments revolve around exactly that and you will repeat under oath that there was never any discussion of the FBI to take down constitutionally protected speech to my knowledge our agents conducted themselves in compliance with the law throughout he said that they simply are compensating twitter for taking actions to address criminal activity not to engage in censorship do you believe him well he may be telling the truth I think it's an open question but there's the FBI but there's also the department of homeland security we do know that they were working with stanford university on internet oversight of all kinds of things not just whether elections are being influenced by russians but whether or not what people are saying about vaccines we do know from the twitter files that they have acknowledged and also from the Missouri versus biden depositions that they have acknowledged that even things they felt to be true but harmful to the government position deserve to be censored the important part of this debate though is that we now get carried away many people on the right are carried away with how terrible big tech is and they now want to regulate big tech or force big tech to take their opinions I don't believe in that at all where I've taken decided to place my emphasis is on the government half of this equation if government is meeting with twitter and paying twitter to encourage them to take down constitutionally protected speech we should limit government from that interaction government shouldn't be involved with trying to limit constitutionally protected speech however if twitter wants to censor me or if youtube wants to take my speech down because I say masks don't work that is their prerogative they're a private company and I would never want to stop them but it's important we make this distinction because there are many on the right wing populist part of particularly the republican party who are saying let's just tell twitter they have to take conservative viewpoints or let's mandate what is actually let's have a review committee I don't want that at all but I do think that a consistent libertarian position is telling the FBI Department of Homeland Security CDC Biden spokesman Biden White House that they can't be meeting on a weekly basis with either overt or implied threats of you need to do this or else we know from the Missouri versus Biden case that there actually were threats of antitrust action being brought against big tech or getting rid of their liability protection if they didn't toe the line that to me is a clear infringement of the first amendment and I think is going to ultimately be the decision will ultimately agree with that will be the spring court hopefully in the near future the book is deception Senator Rand Paul thank you