Senator Rand Paul still has it out for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was pre-emptively pardoned by President Joe Biden, ahead of another Senate committee hearing for “oversight” on Wednesday. Paul chairs this committee.
Over the weekend, Poodle Paul released a tranche of Fauci’s diary entries and Dr. Fauci’s commentary on them, as Paul insists that Fauci lied to Congress about the origins of the coronavirus.
“What [Fauci] wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
Paul released a thread on X on Saturday. The document was taken down on Monday evening, and republished by Tuesday morning with several redactions.
On the origins of the virus, Fauci has asserted that the scientific evidence points to a spillover — whereby the virus would have found its way from an animal into its first human host, and then spread at that point from human to human.
Felicia Goodrum, a virologist at Dartmouth College, contends that Fauci may have been less certain in private than in his public statements about the origins.
“There’s very good evidence that there are two lineages [of SARS-CoV-2] that emerged,” according to Goodrum. “Both of those lineages were present at the market, and susceptible animals were present at the market.”
The market was cleared before samples could be taken to verify the claim, but Goodram says the genetic data “maps all initial cases to that market” and “none to, for example, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they have accused the virus of having been created or released.”
Paul and a Republican-led committee insist the virus was engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and leaked, and funds provided by the NIH supported the Wuhan research to make a more potent and transmissible virus.
Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University, says he disputes this line of reasoning because there is “no actual evidence for it.” And he says that no one, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had a precursor virus similar enough to SARS-CoV-2 to create the pathogen that ultimately caused the pandemic.
Poodle Paul still points to discrepancies in Fauci’s diary entry statements.
On January 26, 2020, Paul points to a Fauci entry that says “the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”
But in the same entry, Fauci writes, “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”
One week later in February 2020, the diary denotes that a dozen researchers in a conference call debated the origins of COVID-19, and the plausibility that the virus evolved naturally.
The notes reveal that only 2 of the 12 supported the natural origin theory, while the others believed that deliberate insertion was possible.
Virologist Goodrum notes that the conversation took place very early on with very little data available as opposed to later in the pandemic.
Also, science takes time to play out, with scientists making the best conclusions possible with the available data, and then changing as data develops.