Rand Paul released some bombshell documents on Monday proving that the authors of the now-infamous "Proximal Origins of COVID-19" were never confident that the virus was not engineered and had not escaped from a lab, and that their suspicions grew over time that it was.
You may have missed this story because...almost nobody covered it, and those who did were all in the conservative media. The paper, used by the media and the COVID mafia to insist that COVID had a natural origin, was a total fraud, as were the authors who maintained in public the line Anthony Fauci wanted them to.
They even coordinated with the Intelligence Community to maintain the fiction.
The authors publicly said there was "no evidence" SARS-CoV-2 was engineered.
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
Privately, Kristian Andersen put the odds of a lab leak at 30%. Eddie Holmes estimated 20% — later revised down to 10%. Those aren't zero.
I've written many times about the genesis, use, and consequences of this fraud perpetrated on the American people by the "trust the science" folks, because it demonstrates conclusively that much of the propaganda about COVID was an ass-covering exercise in which scientists and bureaucrats rushed to control The Narrative™, profit off their "mistake" that resulted in millions of deaths, and aided the massive transfer of wealth and power to themselves and their friends.
The messages also show the authors coordinating directly with the U.S. intelligence community. Andersen told his co-authors he would "have a handler" starting that Thursday…the same day Fauci met with the IC during the 90-day origins sprint.
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
You may recall that the authors originally popped up on Anthony Fauci's radar because they contacted him expressing concerns that the virus was engineered, and within days Fauci had assigned to them the production of a paper stating the opposite. They complied, and Fauci got it published in Nature after editing it himself to make it even stronger.
Fauci then pretended not to even know who produced the paper when it came out, and pushed it out as the official narrative.
When the DARPA DEFUSE proposal leaked, detailing plans to insert furin sites into bat coronaviruses, the group didn't just discuss the science. They discussed managing their paper trail:
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
"stay off email"
"carefully curate some emails for the FOI records"
The authors originally had suspicions, and even while producing their fraudulent paper, expressed them to each other. And the suspicions grew over time, yet they stubbornly maintained that the virus came from nature long after it became clear that the evidence showed otherwise.
The authors believed Gain of Function work was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with help from American institutions: "A lot of the GOF work on SARS-like CoVs is also from WIV, although there are also other labs that have been doing that (e.g., Baric)."
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
They discussed the dangers of Gain-of-Function research and the remarkable similarity between COVID and the grant proposal presented in 2018. They also expressed shock at the fact that it was done in a low-protection environment, increasing the risk of escape from the lab.
They also discussed meeting to address what they called "the Baric/Daszak shitshow" following the DEFUSE leak.
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
They even discussed who might be at fault—two of the most prominent voices presented as "experts" on COVID, both of whom were close associates of Anthony Fauci, the man who pushed them to write and publish the Proximal Origins paper.
Needless to say, they were suspicious, but by then they were deep into the conspiracy to direct attention away from the lab leak possibility, and Anthony Fauci had control over their budgets through his grant-making abilities. They even joked that the grant pipeline would be open for them.
Read the full document release, including everything above and more: https://t.co/nk18AaC7zl
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
These Slack discussions make clear that the men who publicly said that it was a "conspiracy theory" to argue that COVID might have come out of a lab were privately discussing what a "s**t show" was being run in Wuhan by colleagues they stood by.
[Eddie Holmes] "What also annoys me is that Peter should have seen this coming and it is worse than he was suggesting a few days ago. He's a jackass. We still have no evidence for SC2 in that lab and they must have sequenced it first. But it is very striking that a bat-derived… https://t.co/K00DINSXgZ
— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) July 22, 2026
've been covering lab leak controversy for over five years. Every new tranche of documents that's emerged over those years has made our public health leaders look worse:
They lied to the public, concealed their own roles in laying the groundwork for Wuhan's dangerous research, and conspired to discredit scientists like @Ayjchan who exposed evidence that the virus was likely manipulated by Wuhan researchers.
The latest batch of slack messages reveals that they all talked—and joked!—about this behind the scenes, even as they told the public the lab leak theory was "just a conspiracy theory," as Fauci repeatedly said.
This is a scandal for the ages. And we still have not gotten the full accounting we deserve.
There's a ton of damaging information in those documents, implicating Fauci and many of the scientists who were pushed forward by the media as the best and most reliable scientists in the world. It's clear that these men knew they were involved in a cover-up, even though they were uncertain whether the virus was engineered in the lab. They obviously suspected it and saw plenty of evidence that it likely was.
Yet they participated in the cover-up and got huge grants soon after.
Still, the media ignores it. Because it contradicts The Narrative™.
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