Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has had it out for years for former Chief Medical Advisor to the United States Dr. Anthony Fauci, many of whose claims during the dark days of the Biden COVID regime later turned out to be wildly inaccurate.
One of Fauci and Co.’s most controversial stances was that the pandemic arose out of bats, and that any theory that suggested it came as a result of a lab leak was not credible. This even as the source of the outbreak was traced to Wuhan, China — home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which just happens to operate a massive Biosafety Level 4 (BSL‑4) lab.
It doesn’t take any advanced degrees to think, “Huh. That sure seems coincidental.”
Now Sen. Paul says even the Fauci-backed researchers who strongly backed the bat-origin theory weren’t all that sure it was true themselves. He’s got the receipts, in the form of internal messages exchanged between the authors of a key research paper — Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut — on the collaboration app Slack.
1/ NEW: I'm releasing Slack messages from the authors of "Proximal Origin," the paper used to shut down the lab-leak question in early 2020. Their private conversations tell a very different story than their public paper. 🧵
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
The March 2020 paper was published in Nature Medicine and was widely cited by health authorities as debunking the laboratory theory. Anyone who said otherwise was promptly censored and/or mocked. Once President Trump returned to office in January 2025, however, the CIA immediately announced that they actually favor the lab theory. Oh.
Paul says the Slack messages show that the authors weren’t telling the truth about their opinions:
"The idea that it came from a lab is implausible, and, yet, privately they're saying the opposite. … This level of dishonesty, I think, needs to be exposed," Paul told Fox News. "These are people who get large, multimillion-dollar grants from our country, and we shouldn't be giving money to people who lied to us."
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What were they really saying behind closed doors?
The authors publicly said there was "no evidence" SARS-CoV-2 was engineered.
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
Privately, Kristian Andersen put the odds of a lab leak at 30%. Eddie Holmes estimated 20% — later revised down to 10%. Those aren't zero.
This admission here from one of the researchers is pretty much a smoking gun:
"The part I’m really struggling with is that, at the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other — and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there," Andersen wrote on June 11, 2020, according to the documents.
"That’s obviously not to say that somebody did, but we can’t rule it out. Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage."
The authors were also known to be in regular communication with intelligence agencies and Dr. Fauci, who shaped their findings. “Communication” reminds me of another political buzzword: “collusion.”
Get the popcorn ready, though, because the man I call “St. Fauci” is scheduled to testify before Paul and the Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, July 29. Expect Paul to thoroughly grill him over these messages and much, much more.
T-8 days until I put Anthony Fauci under oath.
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 21, 2026
Editor's Note: Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci and Co.’s response to COVID was one of the biggest unconstitutional power grabs of all time.
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