Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) joins CNN's Dana Bash to discuss his new book, The Great Cover-up, and why he believes the government lied about the origins of the Coronavirus, the flu virus that infected millions of people with the flu in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dr. Paul explains how he became a skeptic about the government's cover-up of the truth behind the theory that the virus came from the lab, and how he went about discovering the truth about what really happened in the lab. He also explains why he thinks the government should have been able to get away with lying to the American public about the virus and why it s a good thing it s not a virus at all, because it s actually a virus that can be transmitted to humans by contact with contaminated food, water, or other human organs, and causes millions of Americans to get sick and die from the flu and other respiratory viruses like the common cold. Dr. Rand Rand Paul is a champion of liberty, fiscal responsibility, and a fierce opponent of government overreach. He is a fighter for limited government, limited liberty, and limited government. He is an outspoken champion of civil rights, and stands up to the military industrial complex, and is a fierce defender of the Constitution and the need to return government to its limited constitutional scope. As a hardworking and dedicated physician, not a career politician, Dr. Randolph Paul has fought tirelessly to restore government back into its limited scope as a limited, constitutional scope, as a hard-working and accountable servant of the people s right to a limited government and a champion for their constitutional rights and their limited liberties. In this episode, he reminds us that liberty is possible, not only in practice, but also in practice. in every facet of their lives, not just in every aspect of their day-life, but in everything they need to be free from government, and that they can learn from each other, and they can be free of government, not less than they can do better than we can be. that they are free in a democracy, and we can all have a better understanding of their full access to their ideas and access to information and access and they don t have to pay for it all they can have a say in their education, and so much more to understand their full potential because they can choose their own truth and access it, too.
00:00:09.000Paul has proven to be an outspoken champion for constitutional rights, for fiscal responsibility, as a fierce advocate against government overreach.
00:00:19.000Paul has fought tirelessly to return government to its limited constitutional scope.
00:00:24.000As a hardworking and dedicated physician, not a career politician, Dr.
00:00:27.000Paul 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.
00:00:54.000And 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.
00:01:16.000And you and I have found ourselves very, very close together since the beginning of COVID on so many issues.
00:01:23.000You 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.
00:01:37.000So I have nothing but admiration for you and gratitude.
00:01:41.000Or 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.
00:02:05.000So 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.
00:02:19.000Let's talk about deception and about Anthony Fauci.
00:02:24.000Can you just tell us a little bit about your evolution?
00:02:27.000Did 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.
00:02:37.000You know, in the beginning, I was very resistant from the very, very beginning to the mandates on behavior, the idea that masks work.
00:02:45.000I 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.
00:02:57.000This has been studied for decades, and all the studies really haven't shown that it helped, and it didn't help in public wear.
00:03:04.000So I was aware of that and resistant to that and closing the schools early on.
00:03:08.000But as far as the origins of the virus, it took me a year.
00:03:12.000I was following some of the stuff very closely, the rules and edicts from government.
00:03:17.000But the origins, I remember reading a letter in Lancet, 27 doctors or scientists signed it, and I really didn't read it closely.
00:03:25.000I just assumed, well, you know, the last...
00:03:53.000He's got all kinds of background and resume, and nobody would print it.
00:03:57.000But 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.
00:04:14.000We also learned Anthony Fauci was saying the opposite also.
00:04:17.000When friends would ask him, do you need to wear a mask?
00:04:18.000He was saying, we've studied this, they don't work.
00:04:21.000You know, just be careful about your interactions or whatever.
00:04:26.000But he, in private, was saying the opposite.
00:04:28.000So 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.
00:04:40.000The fact that when a virus comes from an animal, it typically is clumsy because it doesn't infect humans well.
00:04:46.000It'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.
00:04:58.000But it's always more infectious from the animal it came from than it is from humans.
00:05:03.000But we discovered with COVID, as we looked at the sequences early on, that there weren't a bunch of leaps to man.
00:05:09.000There seemed to be one lineage that leaped in the very beginning, which points towards one source, which points towards a lab leak.
00:05:16.000But all of this added up and I became intrigued and somewhat obsessed by the questions over the origin.
00:05:22.000But then I also, as I became convinced that it came...
00:05:25.000And just to interrupt you, Senator Pollack, because I think you meant to make this point...
00:05:30.000It 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.
00:05:43.000Either bats or an intermediate species.
00:05:47.000And 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.
00:06:07.000It 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.
00:06:16.000So all of this modeling showed there didn't seem to be an intermediate species.
00:06:21.000Whether it came directly from bats or from bats to another species, the computers were showing that the fit was actually better for humans.
00:06:28.000And Alina Chan wrote a good book on this viral.
00:06:31.000And in that, she says that when she looked at this, she felt like the virus was pre-adapted for human transmission.
00:06:38.000I think Anthony Fauci knew this in January of 2020.
00:06:42.000I think he's known it from the very beginning.
00:06:44.000And 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.
00:06:58.000And so they strove from the very beginning to cover it up.
00:07:00.000And there's just a trail of lies, you know, lies, obfuscations, cover-up.
00:07:06.000And, you know, in the book, we go through all of this.
00:07:08.000Let's talk about a couple of the characters.
00:07:48.000He's actually schmoozing bureaucrats like Fauci.
00:07:51.000So this is a guy that over the years has gotten over $100 million from the government.
00:07:56.000But he gets it through schmoozing and through fancy proposals.
00:07:59.000But I don't believe he's an honest player.
00:08:02.000I 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.
00:08:13.000I think he has the information on all this and has not been revealing it.
00:08:16.000But 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.
00:08:24.000And one of our sources, you know, we used for the book was The Real Anthony Fauci.
00:08:30.000I just finished your latest one as well.
00:08:33.000So there's so much going on here, but my main goal now in exposing is to make sure it doesn't happen again.
00:08:40.000Robert 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.
00:08:48.000In the end, COVID was bad, and I don't downplay it, but the death rate was 0.3%.
00:08:53.000That's about a million in America, maybe 10 to 15 million.
00:08:56.000But 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.
00:09:07.000We are dealing with something that's as explosively bad as nuclear weapons.
00:09:12.000The 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.
00:09:23.000Doesn'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.
00:09:35.000Yeah, 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.
00:09:53.000And then negotiated treaties in 1973, a bioweapons charter with the rest of the world.
00:10:00.000And that that stood, there was a lot of people who were angry, who were making a living on bioweapons.
00:10:07.000And they were sort of seething for many years.
00:10:10.000And then when the Patriot Act Yeah, I think.
00:10:29.000Fauci'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.
00:10:36.000They started funneling money to Anthony Fauci to do it under the pretext of vaccine development, and that was the beginning of this program.
00:10:45.000And this is one of my goals as we move forward.
00:10:48.000People say, well, what are we going to do?
00:10:49.000Some is about, you know, culpability of those who lied to us.
00:10:53.000But to me, it's more important that this doesn't happen again.
00:10:56.000So 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.
00:11:11.000Almost 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.
00:11:23.000If 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,
00:11:49.000the same way as nuclear weapons, we've sort of dropped off the idea of nuclear weapons control, too.
00:11:56.000The Trump administration quit the negotiations.
00:11:58.000I think there always have to be negotiations.
00:12:00.000And 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.
00:12:12.000The 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.
00:12:26.000You know, he still gets a security detail and a limo pick him up every day, even though he's out of office.
00:12:31.000They really are unwilling to understand that he was part of the problem.
00:12:36.000So it's limited any kind of reforms coming forward.
00:12:38.000I think we may be getting finally beyond that.
00:12:42.000So 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.
00:12:51.000Yeah, 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.
00:13:03.000They'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.
00:13:20.000And 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.
00:14:00.000And 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.
00:14:07.000But 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.
00:14:21.000Nobody knows too many people growing vegetables.
00:14:24.000There are people, but most people aren't getting their food from the garden.
00:14:28.000And so it's going to be a catastrophe if this happens, and we have the ability to stop it from happening.
00:14:34.000But 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.
00:14:43.000Kevin 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.
00:15:01.000And interestingly, it didn't start with COVID-19.
00:15:04.000Until 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.
00:15:13.000And there are some great professors out there.
00:15:16.000You know, Richard Ebright's been talking about this for 15 years, about the dangers of this.
00:15:20.000And there's really been a war in the academic community.
00:15:23.000And they want to make it out like, oh, it's just some crazy people.
00:15:28.000Richard Ebright was a 17-year editor of the Journal of Biochemistry.
00:15:32.000I mean, these are credentialed people at our major universities who think Anthony Fauci was wrong about funding this research.
00:15:39.000And 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.
00:15:58.000So the coronaviruses in this family don't have a special access to the human cell.
00:16:04.000That special access is called a furin cleavage site.
00:16:07.000And so this had never been seen in this family of viruses.
00:16:13.000And the furin cleavage site, just so they know, It's at the end of that spike protein.
00:16:17.000It's almost like a key that fits perfectly into the lock of the ACE2 receptor, which is a cell receptor in the human lung.
00:16:26.000So 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.
00:16:37.000And there was no wild coronavirus in history that was ever able to do that.
00:16:42.000So 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.
00:16:52.000And 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.
00:17:00.000Well, 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.
00:17:06.000The reason that's important is you roll around two years, and then we see the sequence of COVID-19 in January 2020.
00:17:13.000And 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.
00:17:23.000And they should have immediately said, my God, they did it.
00:17:48.000Anthony Fauci never said a word about it.
00:17:51.000Ralph Baric, who's part of it, never said anything about it.
00:17:53.000Peter Daszak never said anything about it.
00:17:55.000But 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.
00:18:06.000And all of those people should have been saying, and they've got to be connected to virology.
00:18:11.000That's why they would be in this meeting.
00:18:12.000Why 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.
00:18:21.000So 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.
00:18:30.000And I keep saying them, this has nothing to do with Biden.
00:18:33.000This happened during the Trump administration or even the Obama.
00:18:36.000This is a longstanding bureaucratic problem as much or more than it is any kind of, you know, one party or the other's problem.
00:19:01.000And I said, well, let's see the argument because we can learn from the argument because you obviously made a mistake.
00:19:06.000It was gain of function and became a pandemic.
00:19:08.000So 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.
00:19:19.000I 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.
00:19:39.000Fauci had this coterie of Scientists whom he funded with millions and millions of dollars.
00:19:47.000And he was able to call them together and create this barrier where they were the leading scientists in the field, supposedly.
00:19:57.000They 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.
00:20:09.000In other words, it was a natural spillover.
00:20:13.000In private, they were all saying to each other, and you got their emails, oh, this has got to be from a lab.
00:20:20.000But 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.
00:20:29.000One of the leading scientists is a guy named Christian Anderson.
00:20:57.000And 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.
00:21:10.000So in private, he's saying it's inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
00:21:13.000In public, he's now saying the best argument, guys, is to say it's consistent with evolutionary theory.
00:21:18.000There'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.
00:21:33.000And some of them are saying, I'm 80% convinced this lab.
00:21:55.000In the abstract, they say this is not a laboratory construct.
00:21:59.000And so I don't think I've ever seen anything like this before.
00:22:02.000I don't think anybody realized how politicized the scientific process was.
00:22:07.000And I think you probably did, because you've seen how the pharmaceutical companies have manipulated things.
00:22:11.000But I think the general public has no idea how political this process is.
00:22:16.000Yeah, 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.
00:22:26.000And 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.
00:22:44.000Christian Anderson, I believe, got a $9 million grant signed in April of that year.
00:22:49.000And, you know, I told you initially, I kind of believed what they were telling us.
00:22:53.000The scientists wrote that letter to Lancet, 27 scientists.
00:22:56.000I said, well, how could 27 scientists get together in line?
00:22:59.000Well, 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.
00:23:08.000Seven 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.
00:23:17.000Several of the others were receiving money indirectly through this, and it's amazing.
00:23:35.000And he was appointed to study this, and he went into it thinking, well, probably came from nature like they always do.
00:23:41.000And he studied it, and he became convinced, as you or I, he became thoroughly convinced that it came from the lab.
00:23:47.000Yeah, well, let me ask you this, because we're running out of time, but this is...
00:23:51.000A question I get every day, and I say if I'm elected president, the answer to that is yes.
00:23:57.000But do you think these guys are ever going to get prosecuted?
00:24:01.000I think it will require another president.
00:24:03.000I don't think this attorney general is going to.
00:24:05.000I've referred Anthony Fauci two times over a two-year period for criminal prosecution for the felony of lying to Congress.
00:24:12.000And 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.
00:24:23.000I 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.
00:24:40.000So 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.
00:24:47.000But I think it's going to take a different perspective.
00:24:49.000President, somebody that will appoint people that are free of conflicts to actually be in charge of this.
00:24:54.000But I don't think this administration will prosecute any of them.
00:24:57.000Well, 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.
00:25:40.000So 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.
00:26:27.000Most of the deaths, half the deaths were in nursing homes.
00:26:29.000You know what I would have done if I were Anthony Fauci?
00:26:32.000I wouldn't have compelled anyone to do anything, but I would have given this bit of advice.
00:26:36.000I would say, protect the elderly with people who have already had COVID and recovered.
00:26:41.000So if I was in charge of the nursing homes, people were getting it right and left.
00:26:45.000A lot of young people were getting it.
00:26:46.000As 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.
00:26:54.000I told this to Trump's detail and they didn't listen to me.
00:26:57.000I told him, put the Secret Service people around him.
00:27:51.000And it became a bone of contention like with YouTube.
00:27:54.000And so I just decided I don't need YouTube.
00:27:56.000My stuff still gets all over YouTube, but I decided to put stuff on a competitor.
00:28:01.000And that's one way the marketplace works.
00:28:03.000And it's one thing that I think some people on the right misunderstand about this.
00:28:07.000Look, do I hate YouTube and all of these big tech companies that censor me?
00:28:11.000Yeah, I have great disagreements with them.
00:28:12.000I would tell them it's incredibly illiberal.
00:28:15.000It's the opposite of being liberal to restrict people's speech.
00:28:18.000But I also don't believe that the government has the right to tell them they have to host my speech.
00:28:23.000I have the ability to go other places.
00:28:24.000Now, I don't like the government interacting with big tech to coerce them or to convince them to take on my speech.
00:28:31.000So 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.
00:28:37.000The FBI shouldn't be meeting with NBC News, but they also shouldn't be meeting with Twitter.
00:28:42.000They shouldn't be meeting with YouTube.
00:28:44.000So when the government is pushing the coercion, there is a First Amendment problem.
00:28:48.000But I think it's important to know that we can't force them to take our opinion either.
00:28:52.000And so that part of it isn't part of the First Amendment.
00:28:55.000We don't always get everything we want.
00:28:57.000And one of our ways to react is not buy their product or not use their product.
00:29:01.000Senator 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.
00:29:19.000Well, thank you, and thanks for having me.