An explosive op-ed by Senator Rand Paul, R-KY, has ripped aside the veil masking the role of major federal agencies, as well as some of the key actors involved in dangerous “gain of function” research, believed by many to have caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sen. Rand’s article, which offers a riveting glimpse into his recent book, “Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up” points to government officials from 15 federal agencies who allegedly knew in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in cooperation with an American research firm, EcoHealth Alliance, was trying to create a coronavirus “shockingly similar to the Covid-19 virus.”
Gain of function is the highly controversial tax-funded research that involves genetically tampering with different virus components in the laboratory, to make them more virulent and transmissible to humans. The professed aim of such dangerous work is to develop vaccines to combat these viruses should they ever spontaneously “appear” and threaten humanity.
The key flaw in this scenario about preventing future pandemics, critics say, is obvious: creating pathogens that don’t exist in nature runs the risk of unleashing them and causing a pandemic. In addition, decades of virus identification have been fruitless, as no human vaccine has ever been developed in advance of a human epidemic.
Pressure from critics and activists in the Obama administration brought about a temporary pause on funding gain-of-function research, especially when it involved potential pandemic pathogens.
But five months before the moratorium was announced, EcoHealth under Fauci chum Peter Daszak, secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated to various labs engaged in collecting bat samples and performing gain of function experiments, including China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Funding From Fauci
Dozens of government officials were privy to the proposal from Wuhan to create a virulent coronavirus, Sen. Paul elaborated in a Fox News appearance. Among them were Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the powerful NIAID agency and chief medical advisor to the Trump and Biden administrations, and Francis Collins, former head of NIH.
Fauci was not only privy to the plan, he reportedly found a way to channel funding for it. The head of NIAID used multiple strategies to conceal his role in the gain of function initiative, including denying that role under oath during Senate committee hearings, Sen. Paul alleges.
The controversial proposal, dubbed “DEFUSE,” called for creating a virus “genetically very similar if not identical to Covid-19,” the senator said.
The initiative came from British zoologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a close Fauci ally. In seeking government funding for his gain of function research, Daszak sent his proposal to at least 15 federal agencies, including NIH, NIAID and many branches of the Defense Department.
“For years, I have been fighting to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of Covid-19 and the DEFUSE project. Under duress, the administration finally released documents that show that the DEFUSE project was pitched to at least 15 agencies in January 2018,” Sen. Paul wrote.
“What does this mean? It means that at least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that EcoHealth Alliance and the Chinese lab were collaborating on gain of function research, and not one of these officials revealed this scheme to the public, “Sen. Paul charges.
“Anthony Fauci’s NIAID was not only briefed on Wuhan’s desire to create this virus, the agency was actually listed as a participant in the initial DEFUSE pitch. In addition, Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab was named as a partner alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the proposal,” Sen. Paul wrote.
“We know that over a dozen other agencies heard the proposal and later, when each agency discovered that Covid-19 was strangely similar to DEFUSE’s proposed virus creation, not one agency head stepped forward to warn the public that the virus was already pre-adapted to transmit freely among humans,” Paul observed.
“Every one of these people chose to keep quiet, and ultimately to conceal information that might have saved lives by letting the world know this was no sleepy animal virus with poor transmission.”
The Kentucky senator slammed the 15 agencies with knowledge of this project for continuously refusing to release any information concerning the controversial research. “We only know of this DEFUSE proposal because a whistleblower, one brave Marine, Major Joseph Murphy, came forward with the truth,” he pointed out. [See Sidebar]
Virus Experimentation Continues in Labs Across the Country
As Covid-19 no longer poses a serious threat to the majority of humanity, readers may wonder if it is still relevant to dwell on the origins of the corona virus and the controversy over gain of function.
The answer, writes Sen. Paul, is that gain of function research continues unimpeded not only in Wuhan, China but in multiple laboratories and research centers in the United States, posing serious risks to human life. Neither the government nor the public can afford to look away.
“We should treat this research as we do nuclear weapons—as the potential threat to human life is even greater,” he said in a talk delivered in Nov. 2023 at a Washington D.C. campus.
A growing number of virologists and other scientists worry that a “lab leak” will happen again, and with even more serious consequences. With Covid, the mortality rate globally was far less than one percent. Experiments are now being carried out with viruses that have the potential for mortality rates between 15 and 50 percent, virologists say.
“The potential for disaster cannot be overstated. Right now, people can order synthetic DNA on the internet, and if they know what they’re doing, they can make the polio virus, among many others,” Sen. Paul said.
The required information is publicly available due to taxpayer-funded initiatives to identify all the viruses in the world, he noted. “With the support of people like Peter Daszak and Bill Gates, the U.S. has been the top international funder of pandemic virus identification for decades.”
What these programs essentially involve is digging exotic viruses out of caves and jungles where humans might never encounter them. The researchers then transport them to labs in key cities, tinker with them to make them more dangerous and transmissible, and publish the results to the world.
“To think that we can prevent future pandemics, even as we continue to seek, catalog, and manipulate dangerous viruses, is the height of hubris,” the Senator commented. “Over the last few years, public health “experts” were wrong about almost everything. If we are to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future, we must reform government and rein in out-of-control scientists and their enablers.”
The Proposal to Create a Lethal Virus Came with Recommended Meds
Peter Daszak, in the DEFUSE proposal, acknowledged the virus research and experimentation would pose a risk of infection to the staff who, once infected, would carry it out of the lab.
To combat the risk, Daszak’s proposal cited three drugs he called “curative,” that would act on cells to prevent viral replication and infection, in the event of exposure to the virus they sought to engineer. One of the recommended drugs was interferon. The two others were hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
As is well-known, these medicines were later maligned as “unsafe” by Fauci and banned for Covid treatment although they both boast safety profiles of 60 years.
Despite the acknowledged risk the proposed virus experimentation would pose to public health, the NIH gave Ecohealth Alliance the money anyway – something Dr. Anthony Fauci was forced to admit when testifying before Congress in 2022, an article in Vanity Fair reported.
EcoHealth Alliance then gave $599,000 of the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead of the grant being halted under a moratorium on gain of function research during the Obama administration, friends in high places succeeded in pushing it through.
By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the DHS, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) according to 990 tax exemption forms it filed in New York, cited by the Vanity Fair article.
Wuhan researcher, Shi Zhengli, nicknamed the “bat lady,” listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae: $665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID.
A Federal Judge Blew The Whistle
The Covid cover-up began in China. That a totalitarian government would conceal its responsibility for a worldwide pandemic is nothing new. What is staggering is the cover-up in the United States, “spearheaded by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his fellow public health bureaucrats,” writes Paul. “And they might have gotten away with their deception if a federal judge hadn’t ordered their emails released.”
In brief, these emails reveal that at the same time Dr. Fauci and other public health “experts” were publicly trashing the theory that the Covid virus originated from a Wuhan lab leak–they were in general agreement that human manipulation was apparent.
These new emails are crucial in that they confirm that by Feb. 2, 2020, Fauci’s teleconference group had identified evidence pointing to a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These scientists knew that the virus’s unique furin cleavage site was very likely the result of experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab. Notably, they also knew that these experiments were being conducted in minimum biosecurity Level 2 labs.
The furin cleavage site is the defining feature that gives Covid-19 the ability to easily infect humans. Its presence on the virus has baffled scientists, since no such site has ever been observed in naturally occurring coronaviruses.
Mike Farzan, an immunologist on the teleconference, wrote that he was “bothered by the furin site” and had difficulty explaining it “as an event outside the lab.”
Another scientist on the teleconference, Kristian Andersen, who had received funding from Fauci’s NIAID, had privately told Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020 that the virus looked engineered, according to the released emails. Yet Andersen would later support Fauci’s efforts to suppress that finding and instead promote a natural origin narrative. The media quickly followed suit. To take one example: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes Covid-19 ‘is not a laboratory construct!” an ABC News headline sneered.
Mobilizing The Assault
The released emails demonstrated that Dr. Fauci was aware as early as Jan. 2020 that many other top scientists were concerned that the virus that would go on to kill between 3 to 7 million people world-wide was possibly engineered in the Wuhan lab. Many of his emails mirrored his uneasiness over the implications this disaster would have for him personally and professionally.
Around this time, the assault on the lab leak theory began to mobilize, led by Fauci and Collins and eagerly joined by the media. By mid-February 2020, Peter Daszak had organized a letter that was published in the prestigious British Lancet stating that the authors, all renowned scientists, stood together “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
What the letter failed to mention is a soaring conflict of interest: Daszak’s organization received millions of taxpayer dollars from the NIH and the State Department—before and during the pandemic—and that millions were funneled through EcoHealth to the Wuhan lab, some of which went to coronavirus research, writes Sen. Paul.
“I just wanted to say a personal thank-you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin,” Peter Daszak gushed to Dr. Fauci in an April 2020 email. “Your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’ origins.”
“Big Tech was censoring posts about the Wuhan lab leak. The media was calling people who talked about the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theorists,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La, noted at the time. “All while Fauci himself was emailing about Covid-19 possibly leaking from the Wuhan lab. Let that sink in.”
When They Threw Out the First Amendment
Many of the disturbing revelations about the collaboration of U.S. federal agencies with Wuhan on gain of function research, and subsequent efforts to suppress the lab accident theory are not new. It’s the scope of the collaboration and cover-up that are shocking.
“Corporate media and Big Tech had taken to labeling anyone who supported the lab-leak theory as a purveyor of misinformation and disinformation,” writes Sen. Paul.
As we now know—thanks to the release of the Twitter Files–the mainstream media and social media giants did not act alone. Many of their efforts to censor speech about the lab-leak theory, lockdowns, masks, vaccines, school closures, and a host of pandemic-related topics were directed by the FBI and other intelligence agencies.
“In other words,” writes Sen. Paul, “the First Amendment was thrown out the window.”
Those challenging the mainstream narrative—that the virus had nothing to do with a lab leak, and certainly nothing to do with gain of function experiments—were trashed as misinformation spreaders, political opportunists and conspiracy theorists.
Yet, thanks to the dogged work of investigative journalists at The New York Post, Fox News and a handful of other outlets who stood up to harassment and intimidation, this newspaper, too, was able to piece together some of the covert machinations that kept the truth about Covid-19 hidden.
Skeptics laughed or rolled their eyes at the allegations reported in these pages. Today, as the fully documented disclosures in The Great Covid Cover-up gain traction, the editorial integrity and concern for truth that went into printing the facts back in 2021 when they were immensely unpopular should be appreciated.
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A Whistleblower’s Conscience
Major Joe Murphy served at DARPA when EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak approached the Defense Department agency in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat coronaviruses.
As Murphy later recounted in a 24-page report he sent to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, a copy of which was obtained by Project Veritas, the project proposed to insert a “furin cleavage site” into a coronavirus to create “a novel chimeric virus”—a virus engineered by combining diverse elements.
The “cleavage site” refers to a chemically sensitive region of the spike protein that would react in the presence of an enzyme called furin, a type of protein found everywhere within the human body, but especially in the lungs.
According to Murphy’s report, the proposal, named Project DEFUSE, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the basis gain of function research moratorium.
Dr. Fauci has repeatedly maintained, under oath, that the NIH and NAIAD have not been involved in gain of function research with the EcoHealth Alliance program. But according to the documents obtained by Project Veritas which outlined why EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal was rejected, DARPA certainly classified the research as gain of function.
“The proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of gain of function research [it proposes],” the DARPA rejection letter explains, according to Major Murphy.
The major’s report goes on to detail great concern over the Covid-19 gain of function program; the concealment of documents’ the suppression of potential curatives like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine; and the mRNA vaccines which, quoting from Daszak’s proposal, he says will be proven ineffective.
He maintains, based on inside information he was privy to, that NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the gain of function research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the United States after DARPA rejected the proposal.
Murphy notes that he found the folder with the documents relating to Daszak’s proposal and DARPA’s rejection completely unmarked with classification or distribution data.
“These files had been placed in the folder in July 2021, which conspicuously aligns with…Senator Paul’s inquiry into NIH/NIAID gain of-function programs,” Murphy attested. “The unmarked nature combined with the timing signals that the documents were being hidden,” the former DARPA officer wrote. “No files at DARPA go unmarked in classification or distribution, including proprietary documents.”
Bombshell Excerpts from The Murphy Report
“To: Capt xxxxx,
“You probably saw earlier this week that more official documents linking NIH and EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology were published by The Intercept. I came across additional incriminating documents and produced an analysis shortly after leaving DARPA last month. This report was routed to the DOD IG office.
“I’m unsure whether the significance of what I communicated is understood by those that received the report. The main points being that: SARS-CoV-2 matches the SARS variants the NIH-EcoHealth program was making in Wuhan; and that the DOD rejected the proposal because the spike proteins being inserted into the variants (gain of function) were deemed too dangerous.
“There’s also information within EcoHealth’s documents about which drugs effectively treat the program’s SARS-CoVs. Because of its (now) known nature, the SARr-CoV-2 illness is readily resolved with early treatment that inhibits the viral replication that spreads the spike proteins around the body.
“Some of these treatment protocols also inhibit the action of the engineered spike protein. For instance, ivermectin (identified as curative in April 2020) works throughout all phases of illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response.
“Of note, chloroquine phosphate (hydroxychloriquine, identified April 2020 as curative) is identified in the proposal as a SARSr-CoV inhibitor, as is interferon, identified May 2020 as curative).
“Several of the documents referenced in the IG report have since been downgraded. Please reach out to me with questions.”
Major Joe Murphy USMC Marine Program Liaison
13 Aug 2021
