Very few people seem to care much about the origin of the Covid pandemic anymore. But Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is an exception, and on Saturday, he dropped a bombshell.
According to Paul, “During his time as NIAID Director, and particularly during the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci took meticulous notes about his work. He made note of conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials.”
On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote:
It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.
If the wet market was not the source and was merely an amplifier, then the virus had to come from somewhere else. That “somewhere else” could have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the separate institution of the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (which was also doing research on coronaviruses found in bats), or some other location. (Horseshoe bats are believed to be the type of bat that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, originated in. Their natural habitat is several hundred miles away. As of May 2021, Chinese authorities have “tested 50,000 animal specimens, including 1,100 bats in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. But no luck: a matching virus still hasn’t been found.”)
Now, Fauci is not the be-all and end-all of science — despite his declaration, “I represent science.” But his public comments throughout 2020 emphasized the likelihood of a “natural origin” and rejected the notion that the virus could have leaked from a lab. While I can’t find an instance in which Fauci explicitly stated that SARS-CoV-2 came from a wet market, he certainly didn’t do anything to dispel that perception — at a time when he was doing many, many interviews and public appearances.
In a May 5, 2020, interview with National Geographic:
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci says. Based on the scientific evidence, he also doesn’t entertain an alternate theory — that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.
As usual, these comments blurred the line between engineered or “manipulated’ in a lab and escaped from a lab. “Gain of function” research accelerates the natural process of evolution, so some scientists may well argue it doesn’t represent “manipulation,” even though the process can make the virus more contagious and virulent. Also recall that Fauci insisted, under oath, that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” when NIH documents indicated otherwise. Fauci later disputed what the term “gain-of-function research” meant and contended that what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing didn’t meet his definition of the term.
Now we know that from very early on, Fauci concluded that he and other public health officials knew — not believed, knew — that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was not the source of the virus.
Do you have any idea how much time I spent, starting on April 3, 2020, and throughout the year, and into the next, tracking down everything that could possibly be learned about Chinese wet markets and the animals that were sold there and the likelihood that those animals could be the source of a virus that spread like wildfire through human beings?
Over and over again in my writing, I pointed to the assessment of Georgetown University professor and pandemic specialist Daniel Lucey, who concluded by looking at the early cases that the focus on the Huanan Seafood Market as the pandemic origin point is simply misplaced. “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace.” There were simply too many early cases of patients who had no tie to the market. Enthusiasts for the wet market theory just hand-waved it away, contending that those patients just had to have some tie to the market, or someone who had been there, that just hadn’t been found by Chinese epidemiologists.
As late as 2023, writers in publications like The Atlantic were arguing that infected animals at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market were the most likely source of the pandemic. Last year, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, argued that the virus most likely came to Wuhan from animal traders. “Because of the large distances and short timing, the most plausible route of transmission was through the wildlife trade via intermediary hosts,” namely “palm civets and raccoon dogs.”
For the entirety of 2020 and long after, the “it started in a wet market” view was the respectable one. Believing that somebody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn’t been careful one day and had gotten accidentally infected with a virus that had gained a function or two during its time in the lab made you a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, the lab leak theory was evidence of your racism.
And now — in July 2026! — we learn that Fauci himself had dismissed the wet market as a potential source at the end of January 2020.
Dr. Fauci will testify before Senator Paul and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday.
