Jim Geraghty of National Review Online responds to a recent revelation about a major player in the COVID-19 shutdown regime.
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.” …
… 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. …
… 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. …
… 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.
