Covid Origin: Rand Paul Opens a Huge Can of Worms

By Hans Mahncke & Jeff Carlson

Earlier this week, Senator Rand Paul made hugely significant disclosures about the origin of Covid. The main focus of media reporting – that is, where the media reported about it at all – has been on the fact that 15 US government agencies were aware of a 2018 blueprint for creating Covid in a lab, yet all remained silent when Covid arrived in late 2019. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The disclosures are far more damaging than that.

Paul’s disclosures can be roughly divided into three categories. First, there is the fact that 15 government agencies were allegedly aware of the DEFUSE scheme. That scheme was a 2018 blueprint for making Covid-like viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Second, it now appears as if two highly significant individuals, Vincent Munster from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Ian Lipkin from Columbia University, were directly involved in creating the DEFUSE blueprint. Third, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency that is nominally responsible for administering civilian foreign aid, funded gain-of-function experiments at the WIV. The director of USAID, Samantha Power, has denied that her agency funded the WIV. But documentary evidence proves otherwise.

15 government agencies

When Covid started spreading like a wildfire across the globe in January 2020, it was immediately apparent that it was not a normal virus. Genomic sequencing showed that the virus had an anomalous feature in its receptor binding domain: a furin cleavage site. The site allowed the Covid virus to easily dock with human cells. Such a site has never been observed in naturally occurring SARS viruses.

When Fauci-funded scientist Robert Garry saw that the Covid virus had a furin cleavage site, he immediately observed, “I just can't figure out how this gets accomplished in nature…Of course, in the lab it would be easy.” Garry's observation, which was made in a private chat group comprising other Fauci-funded scientists, did not become publicly known until it was unearthed by congressional investigations in 2022. Publicly, Garry and four other scientists proclaimed in the now infamous Proximal Origin paper from March 2020 that Covid definitively had a natural origin.

Stunningly, a group headed by Fauci-funded president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, had drawn up a blueprint in 2018 to insert a furin cleavage site into a SARS virus backbone. That blueprint was called DEFUSE. The existence of this proposal was covered up by its authors until someone leaked the proposal to the virus origin search group DRASTIC in September 2021. For many, including us, the revelation that Daszak, who had deep entanglement with the WIV, had a blueprint for making Covid-like viruses a year ahead of Covid emerging, was a smoking gun. When it was later disclosed, in December 2023, through a FOIA release to the transparency group US Right to Know, that Daszak intended to carry out the DEFUSE experiments at the WIV, the smoking gun became near incontrovertible evidence that Covid had come out of the WIV.

The fact that the authors of DEFUSE (which, aside from Daszak, comprised the director of the WIV, Shi Zhengli, her collaborator, Wang Linfa, and the so-called godfather of gain-of-function experiments, Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina) concealed the existence of DEFUSE is another data point that suggests that the Covid virus was made at the WIV.

The new information unearthed by Rand Paul is that it was not just the authors who concealed the existence of DEFUSE. In fact, the DEFUSE proposal was pitched at a “Proposers Day” event organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2018. It was at this event that representatives of 15 government agencies, including Fauci’s NIAID and USAID, would have heard about Daszak’s proposal to create Covid-like viruses. Yet, not one of these representatives came forward in January 2020 to tell the world that Daszak had a proposal that looked eerily similar to the Covid virus. 

Involvement of Munster and Lipkin

While media reports about Paul’s revelations, in as far as they exist at all, have focused on the 15 government agencies, that part of the disclosures is not the most damning. That is because it could be argued that while the 15 agencies had heard about the DEFUSE proposal, the respective agency representatives may not have been directly involved with DEFUSE and may not have made the connection with Covid, when it arrived. This is where Paul’s second disclosure is far more incriminating. Specifically, Paul revealed for the first time that Vincent Munster, of NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories, and Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, were both listed as partners in the DEFUSE proposal presented at DARPA’s “Proposers Day”.

This revelation is highly significant because it ties Fauci's NIAID directly to the DEFUSE proposal. Up until now, it had been speculated that Fauci and people in his organization must have known about DEFUSE, but there was no direct link. The closest we had was a secret meeting held between NIAID representatives and the DEFUSE authors in October 2019. While the timing of that secret meeting, around the time when Covid leaked from the WIV, is very notable, it does not prove in itself that NIAID knew about plans to make Covid-like viruses at the WIV. The fact that Munster was part of the original DEFUSE pitch in 2018 changes this. It is now evident that Fauci's organization knew about the DEFUSE blueprint and that it was likely involved in covering up its existence.

The revelation with respect to Lipkin is perhaps even more stunning. That is because Lipkin is one of the five people who co-authored the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper, a Fauci-led effort to cover up the fact that Covid came out of the WIV. This means that one of the originators of the DEFUSE blueprint for making Covid-like viruses at the Wuhan lab is directly involved in covering up the lab origin of Covid. The ethics declarations section of Proximal Origin, which is where authors are required to list any conflicts of interest, does not contain any disclosure by Lipkin. Incidentally, the ethics section also conceals the fact that Fauci, who had a massive conflict of interest in that he funded the WIV, was involved in the creation and writing of Proximal Origin.

USAID

During an April 10, 2024, Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, USAID Administrator Samantha Power was asked by Paul about her agency's involvement in funding gain-of-function experiments at the WIV. Power replied that USAID has seen no evidence that the agency funded any gain-of-function experiments. But this testimony is directly contradicted by an acknowledgment in the journal Nature that USAID did indeed fund such experiments. The Nature article at issue describes a 2015 gain-of-function experiment that involved the WIV's Shi and the University of North Carolina's Baric.

In the experiment, Shi and Baric used a “SARS-CoV reverse genetics system” and “generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.” In layman's terms, they constructed a synthetic virus that had the ability to infect humans. This is a poster book example of gain-of-function, as the synthetic virus “gains” a function, specifically the ability to infect humans.

The experiment was, according to Shi's and Baric's own acknowledgment, carried out with funding from USAID. The acknowledgement states that the funding was funneled to the WIV via Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance. This is the same mechanism by which Fauci sent money to the WIV.

It is not known why USAID, an agency that is supposed to provide aid to developing countries, was involved in reckless virus creation experiments in a lab with known ties to the Chinese Community Party, as well as the People's Liberation Army. Power's denial of the documented fact that her agency did, in fact, fund gain-of-function experiments at the WIV only raises more questions.