Throughout the pandemic, Rand Paul did the press’s job for them
Is there a more impactful event in our time than the global COVID-19 pandemic that touched nearly every human being on earth for two years?
There were so many obvious questions: How did this happen? Were governments responsible for it? Was it an individual? If so, who was it?
Some of the most crucial questions imaginable.
Now, Senator Rand Paul has written the book on it. Literally.
Reading his new book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, I was constantly reminded that Paul would often be the only one to ask the most pressing questions - about origins, mandates, lockdowns, vaccines - questions you might have expected journalists to hound government officials and health experts about but hardly did.
It’s like the press just figured the government knew what it was doing and left them alone.
When Paul would focus on the top health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci - the man probably most worth asking - journalists, instead of following up to see if the senator’s questions had validity, would instead shield the White House’s top doctor and attack Paul. Fiercely. “Anthony Fauciis a veteran immunologist who has spent 50 years protecting the health of the American public,” sneered Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin in July 2021.
She added, “Yet strangely, since the coronavirus began, Paul has decided that he knows more about infectious diseases than Fauci, whose literal title is ‘director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.’”
Yeah, stuff like that. All the time. From alleged journalists. Fauci was treated not as an unelected public official responsible for making big decisions, and thus fair game for questioning, but as an infallible science god.
It was bizarre.
For example, if the biggest question might be determining the virus’s origins: In 2021, when Paul asked Fauci if US-funded gain-of-function research was the possible cause of COVID-19, Fauci vehemently denied it. Paul was instantly derided as a conspiracy theorist and Fauci was praised for even having to deal with such a challenge.
Today, the National Institutes of Health admits that gain-of-function research occurred in Wuhan (with US taxpayers illegally footing the bill) and even the FBI believes that was the most likely origin.
Where might we be on this origin question today if Paul had not first raised it? It’s worth knowing that we had FOIAs proving Fauci had funded this research in the Wuhan lab all the way back in 2020 (filed by the White Coat Waste Project), but without Paul’s bully pulpit the public would never have known because the media shunned the information.
Deception takes readers through the many details of this journey to find out what was true and not about the pandemic, and has put together what has to be one of the most thoroughly sourced assessments of that time.
The purpose of Paul’s book, by his own admission, is not necessarily to punish Fauci or others who made terrible mistakes or committed possible crimes - not that those responsible should go unpunished either - but so that it doesn’t happen again.
That should be the goal for everyone—to never repeat such a calamity, and if it does happen, to radically rethink our approach based on the disastrous first go round.
Rand Paul’s latest book is a good place to start.
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