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“Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chair, has cast himself as a contemporary Joe McCarthy intent on ferreting out the truth about one man’s supposed crimes against his country…Just before leaving office, President Joe Biden took the remarkable step of providing Dr. Fauci with a blanket pardon… On the advice of his lawyers, the 85-year-old Dr. Fauci made the extraordinary choice during Wednesday’s hearing to plead the Fifth… The effect was a useless drama that offered zero insights to a public desperate for them.”

— The New York Times

In a Senate hearing Wednesday, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), about Covid, and US-funded gain of function experiments. “Can you explain to the committee why you chose to fund this dangerous research in China?”

Fauci answered by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, for the first of 100 times:

This ought to have marked a dramatic and final end to years of hagiographic worship of the man, and commenced a long overdue decision to investigate science’s role in causing the pandemic.

No luck. The reaction to Wednesday’s hearing makes clear that there is no amount of evidence that will move half of the American population off its religious devotion to this invidious huckster-narcissist whose reckless behavior endangered the world. Nothing gets through. Documentary evidence doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the FBI and the Department of Energy point in that direction. Not even a desire for self-preservation — the investigation of Fauci and other scientists is a necessary precursor to learning how an engineered virus killed millions — will shake this segment of the population.

A sample of the revelations that have been, and apparently will continue to be, ignored:

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We didn’t know much about Covid when it first arrived in America. Now we all know the basics.

To start, Covid-19 a.k.a. SARS CoV-2 is a bat virus that can’t infect bats. The reason it can’t infect bats is because of twelve nucleotides inserted into the viral genome, to create something called a “furin cleavage” site. With this addition, the virus not only lost its ability to bind to receptors in bats, but became extremely transmissible to humans. “If you remove the furin cleavage site,” wrote former CDC Director Bob Redfield in his book Redfield’s Warning, “there is no pandemic.”

Either SARS-CoV-2 went through an organic mutation fundamentally changing its character in one go, or it was engineered. This is why the scientists who ended up writing the Nature Medicine article arguing for natural or “zoonotic” origin of Covid were initially shocked to the point of gallows humor when they learned about the presence of a furin cleavage site. Hence the quote from Dr. Kristian Andersen, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work.”

As one virologist told me three years ago: “If someone proposes to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS coronavirus in Wuhan, and then one year later we see a bat SARS coronavirus with a furin cleavage site in Wuhan, that is highly unlikely to be a natural event.”

All the way back on December 30, 2011, Fauci published “A flu risk worth taking” in the Washington Post, arguing for gain of function research. “Important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” he wrote. As for dangers of experiments involving the development of pathogenic viruses in labs, he said weighing the risks is “not simple,” but “the engineered viruses… are maintained in high-security laboratories.” Despite a number of previous biosecurity mishaps, Fauci was confident lab security would protect populations from “generated” viruses.

Three years later, on June 1st, 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded $3.7 million to the EcoHealth Alliance in a grant titled, “Understanding the risk of coronavirus bat emergence.” A portion of those funds went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to study pathogenic bat viruses. This was just ahead of a decision in October of that same year by the administration of Barack Obama to institute a freeze on gain-of-function research. This ought to have ended U.S. involvement in the business of taking dangerous diseases and engineering them to be even more dangerous.

Unfortunately, on January 7th, 2017, the outgoing Obama White House issued a “Recommended Policy Guidance for Departmental Development of Review Mechanisms for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight,” also known as P3CO. This revised definition was a semantic leprechaun trick, redefining a “potential pandemic pathogen” as one “capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations,” essentially creating a loophole to work with wild viruses.

As former CDC Director Bob Redfield explained the other day: “If you start with a pathogen that’s already pathogenic for humans and you make it more pathogenic or more transmissible, that’s gain of function research,” he said. “But if you were to start with a pathogen that's not pathogenic for humans, i.e. COVID, and make it pathogenic for humans, by definition, that’s not gain of function research.”

This loophole is what health officials used to deflect attention from gain of function research. Paul for instance just released correspondence between the FBI and NIH in 2020. In response to FBI questions then about US-funded research in China, Ashley Sanders of the NIH told the FBI on May 22, 2020 that:

The replacement policy, Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO), requires additional review and oversight of experiments that are anticipated to increase a potential pandemic pathogen’s transmissibility or pathogenicity in humans. The viruses created under this award are chimeric bat viruses… While chimeric viruses were created via this award, they would not be considered GoF... For example, expressing the spike protein of SARS-CoV in the WIV-1 backbone did not increase the pathogenicity of WIV-1 beyond that of SARS-CoV.

Fauci in his diaries complained on October 7th, 2021 about the “nonsense” in Congress “as to the gain of function issue.” In Fauci’s mind, it was a non-issue because he was legally covered by the loophole:

Eco Health should have let the NIH know that in some of the mouse experiments there was an increase in pathogenicity associated with the chimeric virus. However… even with that increase in pathogenicity, the experiment and the result still does not fall under the category that would trigger P3CO. In other words, according to the operable definition of gain of function of concern at the time, this was not gained a function of concern. Namely, it was not an experiment that would increase the transmissibility and pathogenicity a virus that would likely cause widespread transmission and morbidity/mortality IN HUMANS.

Fauci’s whole defense is the adverb “likely.” He concedes that the EcoHealth experiments brought about an “increase in pathogenicity,” but rather than being concerned with the real question — did that research lead to an accidental leak of a manipulated virus that killed millions? — he reassured himself that he was insulated from legal danger because the funding in question did not constitute gain-of-function research in his mind, because it was not “likely” to cause widespread transmission in humans.

Added to other devastating passages from Fauci’s diaries, like the line, “given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go,” there’s little doubt left that the virus was indeed “constructed,” and came from the Wuhan Institute.

None of it will matter. Even after Fauci pleaded the fifth, news outlets across the country are covering the story as a “Republican pile-on.” This continues a pattern that began in the first days of the pandemic.

When Covid-19 arrived in early 2020, there was no reason for the question of its origins to be politicized. That changed when Donald Trump made a string of statements deemed “false, confusing, and inconsistent,” like saying the disease was “a little bit like the flu,” that “the risk to the American people remains very low,” and that “we have it totally under control.”

On some of these questions, Trump was indeed incorrect, but that didn’t make the opposite of any Trump statement true. The latter viewpoint was every bit as unscientific as anything Trump said.

This is how the story was handled, though. Fauci emerged as an anti-Trump, which to the press made him a beacon of truth. If Trump said the disease had “little impact on young people,” Fauci told governors they should be “careful, particularly when it comes to children”; if Trump said the disease will just “go away,” Fauci said “things will get worse”; if Trump said “we’d much rather be ahead of the curve than behind it,” Fauci countered with, “You’re always behind where you think you are.”

From that point, instead of investigating the disease, legacy press concerned itself with turning Fauci into not just a rock star, but a sex symbol. Fauci t-shirts rushed off the line, along with votive candles, bobbleheads, mugs, “In Fauci We Trust merch,” and other totems of political Beatlemania. The New Yorker ran a feature on how he became “America’s doctor,” the Atlantic told us “America is Thirsty for Anthony Fauci,” calling him a “heartthrob,” while NBC cold-opened Saturday Night Live in April, 2020 with Brad Pitt playing the murine immunologist.

On Fauci’s 80th birthday, celebrities serenaded him, including Orlando Bloom, Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Amy Poehler, Lily Tomlin, Sophia Bush, Matthew McConaughey, Steve Buscemi, Magic Johnson, and Joan Baez. In the newly released diaries we learned the latter crushed hard on Fauci. Baez wrote to him, “I wonder if you have any idea (probably not) how important you are to us,” and painted a portrait of him that could have been a pre-teen girl’s rendering of a unicorn or pony. Fauci ate it all up, sticking it in his just-released diary, along with other happy memories:

The hero worship will never end. After watching Fauci “plead the FIF,” my own dickhead Senator Andy Kim used the hearing to rivet his lips to Fauci’s posterior, blessing him with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech:

Would Kim answer five minutes of questions from me, one of his constituents, about this performance? He won’t have to, because he’ll never face the kind of full-court media press that motivates politicians to act. Again, none of this has a thing to do with Republicans or Democrats. It’s strictly about getting to the bottom of a historical disaster, and because one blue state heartthrob is in the middle of the action, half the country is averting its eyes, trying to filibuster an investigation of global importance. God help us when this happens again.

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Probation and radicalization counseling fail in Germany.

Narrated by Jared Moore

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Text published 07/27/26:

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“The Farrar phone call was different. The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furin cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates. They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.”

— From the diaries of Dr. Anthony Fauci, January 31, 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci never told the president, the media, Congress, anyone about any evidence suggesting the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a lab accident or leak from the Wuhan Institute in China. The public was deceived about this, not just by Dr. Fauci but by much of the scientific community. The consequences of that decision have still not been wrestled with, considering the millions of deaths worldwide.

“That’s the story here,” says former CDC Director, Dr. Bob Redfield. “It was created by science. That scientific decision had more consequences of loss of human life than all nuclear bombs.

On the heels of Senator Rand Paul’s release of hundreds of pages of Fauci’s personal diaries, the former head of NIAID will testify before the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee tomorrow beginning at 8:30 AM ET. It’s hard to remember a more consequential Congressional standoff. Will Fauci offer any new information? Will he be more candid about the origins of the pandemic? Will he hide behind piles of “I don’t recall” answers? One imagines the latter is most likely, but there is a chance for real drama tomorrow.

, who was working was on the proverbial front lines in an Emergency Room in southern Massachusetts when the pandemic arrived, will be joining me to provide live commentary on the hearings. You can find us on X, @mtaibbi or at:

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The release of Fauci’s diaries, coupled with the hearings, will mean I’ll have to put my reporter hat back on in coming weeks. Racket ran many stories on the origins of Covid-19. In July of 2023 I worked with Michael Shellenberger and Alexandra Gutentag of Public on one in particular that seemed sure to have a major impact.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic retrieved the private slack discussions of five scientists — Dr. Kristian Andersen, Dr. Robert Garry, Dr. Andrew Rambaut, Dr. Edward Holmes, and Dr. Ian Lipkin — who authored a crucial paper for Nature Medicine called “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which became the chief reference for news media in establishing a natural or zoonotic origin for the Covid-19 virus. Whenever any news outlet speculated that the disease might have originated as, say, a lab accident, the “Proximal Origin” paper was cited as the authority to shoot it down.

The first time I looked at those slack messages, I thought they were a head shot, fatal to the credibility not only of those five scientists, but of the senior health officials with whom they interacted at the outset of the pandemic, like Jeremy Farrar and Drs. Francis Collins and Fauci.

The chats, after all, showed the scientists all but endorsing the idea of a lab leak. Referencing the “furin cleavage site” in the Fauci diary quote above, Andersen wrote, “The presence of furin moves me a posteriori slightly more towards accidental release.” In another note he wrote, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work.” Dr. Garry added, “The major hangup I have is the polybasic cleavahe [sic] site… it’s not really a natural process.” The most damning line, to me, came from a Holmes comment about the famed “wet market” theory: “No way,” he wrote, “the selection could occur in the market.”

In a normal media environment these texts would have prompted an all-out investigation into what happened in the U.S. health bureaucracies. Why were so many high-ranking officials steered away from any investigation of the Wuhan laboratory? Why were four (at least) different U.S. government agencies funding work at a Chinese military lab? How was it that so-called gain-of-function research appeared to be continuing with American backing, long after a moratorium had been announced? Last but not least, why was the press so unwilling to investigate Fauci, who as far back as 2011 printed an article in the Washington Post arguing that “important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” insights whose benefits outweighed the risks even of a pandemic:

Once Fauci’s communications with the “Proximal Origin” authors became public, a functioning press would have been off and running with a major investigation. It did not take that step only because Fauci had been propped up in the press as a rational, dependable anti-Trump, the figure a frightened country could turn to in a panic.

If the press didn’t keep investigating, Senator Paul and his staff did, hammering away until it procured new documents and secured the hearing. Tomorrow may prove uneventful, but there’s at least a chance we’ll get an important answer or two. I’m also looking forward to watching alongside old friend Dr. Bivens, who has a wealth of knowledge on the subject, and questions of his own, arising from his clinical experience. More to come, but please come by tomorrow.

“And I proclaim,” Stepan Trofimovich shrieked, in the last extremity of passion, “and I proclaim that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the younger generation… ”

With this outburst at a provincial fête, Stepan Verkhovensky — one of the main characters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons — seals his fate as the enemy of political progress, in the eyes of a movement he’s loved all his life. It’s one of a list of comic twists in a critical portion of the novel, which Brad Pearce and I will be back discussing today.

On speech, Donald Trump is making a mess, for himself and the country.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 07/24/26:

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“And I proclaim,” Stepan Trofimovich shrieked, in the last extremity of passion, “and I proclaim that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the younger generation… ”

With this outburst at a provincial fête, Stepan Verkhovensky — one of the main characters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons — seals his fate as the enemy of political progress, in the eyes of a movement he’s loved all his life. It’s one of a list of comic twists in a critical portion of the novel, which Brad Pearce and I will be back discussing today. Join us at 4:30 PM ET at:

Substack

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You can also find us on X, @mtaibbi or @waywardrabbler. See you soon!

On Saturday evening, a German-born man attacked a Pride Parade, first chasing people with a machete, then driving a van into a crowd, and finally running “toward officers with a sharp instrument” before being shot dead in the town of Spandau. One woman was killed, and 29 other were injured at the Christopher Street Day event, which was guarded by 2,200 police officers, up from 1,300 last year. “How did he even get into the Tiergarten?” one attendee was quoted as saying. “There were anti-car and anti-truck barriers everywhere.”

Berlin-born Abdel Ballout got past more than anti-car and anti-truck barriers to make his attack. In a journey that Jonathan Swift couldn’t have scripted, he was practically escorted to the site by German authorities:

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