Ebola is one of the most dangerous viruses that exist. Contracting this disease is very nearly a death sentence. It's a hemorrhagic fever, meaning that it causes uncontrollable bleeding; an Ebola patient shows petechia from subcutaneous bleeding, as well as bleeding internally and from every bodily orifice. Death comes after days of agony as the patient's interior is rendered into mush by the virus. It's a horrible way to check out, and the only mitigating factor is that the Ebola virus is a very fragile thing; it can only survive seconds outside of a host and ultraviolet light kills it as surely as a blowtorch. It can only spread by direct body fluid to body fluid contact.
So, when we find out that the U.S. Army may have been carrying out a study funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to study aerosolizing this deadly bug, it should be a matter of great concern. When you find out that the guy who was in charge of NIAID, when he found out about this, seemed more concerned with keeping it quiet than cleaning it up and halting the whole thing, that's another story. But that seems to be what another release from the Fauci Diaries by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) would indicate.
Records released by Chairman Paul reveal risky research NIAID was funding with the Department of Defense. NIAID paid for and helped design a 2015 experiment that exposed vaccinated monkeys to aerosolized Ebola.
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) September 28, 2026
Read the docs:https://t.co/xKki1luYxT
The attached documents may be viewed here.
The research was reportedly carried out at the Army's Fort Detrick. The NIAID paid for the study, unbeknownst to Dr. Fauci, according to the report. The work exposed four vaccines to groups of four monkeys each exposed to the aerosolized Ebola (and if those two words don't send a shiver of horror up your spine, they should). Almost all the monkeys died; the vaccines apparently did nothing. The documents Senator Paul released indicate the monkeys died of "necrosis, inflammation and fibrin in the lungs," symptoms not seen in the control animals who did not receive the vaccines.
When Dr. Fauci learned of the work, according to the account, he "went bonkers."
"What idiots those guys at (U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) USAMRIID are," he wrote on March 7, 2016. The work "should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place." Two days later he faulted the "foolish DOD people" for sending the data to the FDA and circulating it to embassies, and wrote than such experiments should be classified because they "could indicate a vulnerability."
Senator Paul spoke to the outlet Just The News on the matter.
“These records show NIAID was funding risky research with the Defense Department, and when the results turned problematic, Dr. Fauci argued they should have been classified," Paul said. "The email he sent demanding answers went to his longtime special assistant, who has since declined to answer the Committee's questions.
"Americans deserve to know what kind of risky research their taxpayer dollars are funding. It is clear additional oversight is needed into what Dr. Fauci's institute was paying for long before COVID," he added. "This is exactly why Congress should pass the Risky Research Review Act. Under my bill, an independent board of outside scientists would have to review research like this before a single taxpayer dollar went out the door."
While we can't read Dr. Fauci's mind (nor would I care to) it sure looks a lot like he was more concerned with keeping this experiment quiet than putting a stop to this or any other research along these lines. Of course, we can't prevent China, or Russia, or Iran, or North Korea from messing about with stuff like this, but we can at least stop our own country's messing about with possible civilization-ending pathogens. We can give Dr. Fauci some credit for his anger at learning of this work, but this seems like something that should have warranted immediate exposure, along with the people who set this thing up being called to account.
These are wildly dangerous experiments, and they were going on, we see now, well before the COVID-19 panics. COVID-19 was an unpleasant bug that caused a massive overreaction on the part of the federal and state governments, but something like an aerosolized Ebola could be everything the most frantic COVID-19 doomsayers even imagined, and then some. An engineered Ebola virus, aerosolized and fortified to survive even a few minutes longer outside a host, could kill billions. Yes, billions. This is why military people will often tell you, when speaking of NBC — Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons, that biologicals are the real horror. Speaking as a biologist, I freely admit that the notion of weaponized pathogens scares the absolute kapok out of me.
I've long said and written that the Great War was the war of chemists, that World War II was the war of physicists, but that any third world war will be a war of biologists. We may have just gotten a glimpse of what such a weapon might look like; and the NIAID and USAMRIID were messing around with it.
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