U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky excoriated the government yet again Tuesday for the lack of accountability taken for its draconian response to COVID-19 and particularly for the lack of transparency regarding the virus’ origins.
“The cover-up went beyond public statements. Federal agencies and key officials withheld and continue to conceal crucial information from both Congress and the public,” Paul said in his opening remarks at a Senate hearing dedicated to COVID’s origins. “This has been a deliberate, prolonged effort to deceive the committee about certain gain-of-function research experiments that the agencies have been withholding. What we have found as we’ve gone through this is at every step there’s been resistance.”
“So the hearing today is to try and find out whether or not we can get to the truth,” he said. “Do we know for certain it came from the lab? No, but there’s a preponderance of evidence indicating that it may have come from the lab. Do we know viruses have come from animals in the past? Yes, they’ve come from animals in the past. But this time, there’s no animal reservoir. There’s no animal handlers with antibiotics. There’s a lot of reasons why there are indications that this could have come from the lab.”
During the hearing, Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright testified that he saw “zero” evidence pointing to a natural origin for COVID and that the “large preponderance of evidence indicates SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, entered humans through a research incident.”
He noted that China’s embattled Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), housed in the Chinese city where COVID first appeared, was more than 800 miles from “the closest bats harboring SARS-CoV-2 live viruses that could have served as progenitors,” but the laboratory did have “the world’s largest research program on bat SARS viruses” and “the world’s largest collection of bat SARS viruses,” including “the virus most closely similar to SARS-CoV-2.”
Pushing back on the lab-leak theory was Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane School of Medicine, who pointed to evidence that civilians had been exposed to COVID at least twice in one of Wuhan’s so-called wet markets, the heart of the theory that the virus developed naturally.
“So, just in the last few minutes, Dr. Garry has told us that this couldn’t have come from bats. It had to go through an intermediate host,” Paul responded. “That may well be true, but arguing against that is they tested 90,000 some-odd animals and there is no animal host that’s been found. But what he also doesn’t tell you is the animal host could be a laboratory animal. It could be passed serially through that. And that’s one way of quickly adapting and pushing natural selection to adapt a virus toward humans.”
The American people deserve complete transparency on the origins of COVID-19. The pandemic killed millions of people and shut down global economies.
Our federal and state governments used the pandemic as a justification to strip Americans of their civil liberties and freedoms.… pic.twitter.com/HPJGTmIk4H
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 18, 2024
“The American people deserve complete transparency on the origins of COVID-19. The pandemic killed millions of people and shut down global economies,” Paul later declared. “Our federal and state governments used the pandemic as a justification to strip Americans of their civil liberties and freedoms. Children missed critical developmental opportunities, families lost jobs, and businesses were forced to close.”
Publicly, the theory that COVID escaped from WIV, as opposed to evolving in nature, was widely mocked and dismissed since Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas 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. But leaked emails and other reports later revealed that top government officials were aware of the possibility from the beginning.
In May 2021, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee released a report finding “significant circumstantial evidence” that COVID spread from a leak at the Wuhan lab. Under former director and White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) approved funding for EcoHealth to explore gain-of-function (GOF) research, which entails intentionally strengthening viruses to study their effects, at several sites, including the Wuhan lab.
Fauci and his defenders insisted that the work NIAID approved was not gain-of-function research and could not have led to COVID, but the conservative investigators of Project Veritas released documents showing that, before going to NIAID, EcoHealth previously pitched its funding request to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which rejected it on the grounds that the project would violate a preexisting moratorium on GOF research and failed to account for its potential risks.
Former EcoHealth vice president Andrew Huff, who quit in 2016, has also attested that the organization “did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak,” and that as early as 2015, he voiced to EcoHealth officials his concerns that the company “did not have enough visibility or firsthand knowledge of what was happening at foreign laboratories (it) contracted and managed.”
U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates