WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The FBI under the Biden administration intervened to prevent EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak from being questioned about the origins of COVID-19 and his 15 years of work with the Chinese lab from which the virus likely escaped, according to documents released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
Paul, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, announced that the documents detail how the U.S. Customs & Border Protection’s (CBP) National Targeting Center identified Daszak as an “extremely high person of interest” and intended to question him in February 2021 about his “activities in China, his contacts at WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology], and whether he collected or carried biological samples,” given his involvement in controversial “gain-of-function” research, which entails intentionally strengthening viruses to study their potential effects.
However, three days before Daszak’s planned arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport to return to the U.S., “CBP received a request from the FBI’s New York Field Office: do not stop the subject,” the announcement says. “The inspection never took place.”
“This isn’t the whole story. It’s the start of one,” Paul teased on X. “The Reading Room will be updated on a rolling basis as the investigation continues.”
COVID’s origins is one of several still-unresolved scandals that linger half a decade after the pandemic.
Publicly, the theory that COVID escaped from WIV, as opposed to evolving in nature, was widely mocked and dismissed since Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) floated it in February 2020, and for months any suggestion of it was condemned as misinformation. It was not until mid-2021, well after Democrats had retaken the White House, that mainstream media outlets began to acknowledge it as a possibility.
In 2024, the U.S. House Oversight & Accountability Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its long-awaited After Action Review on COVID-19 and the government response.
It concluded that COVID most likely “emerged as the result of a laboratory or research related accident,” that the federal government supported gain-of-function research at WIV without adequate transparency or oversight, and that former White House COVID adviser and National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci “played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research” to deny it, as well as prompting creation of the controversial “Proximal Origins” paper to attempt to discredit the lab-leak theory. It further found that officials within NIAID actively attempted to flout Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents on the matter, such as by intentionally misspelling various names and terms so they would be harder to find in word searches.
Paul has advocated that the Justice Department prosecute Fauci for lying to Congress on this and other COVID matters, though President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon for Fauci before leaving office, rendering any future prosecution highly unlikely to be attempted and even less likely to stand. Paul argues that the attempt should be made regardless, so the courts can decide whether or not to uphold the pardon in light of questions about Biden’s mental capacity and decision-making ability in his last days in office.