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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5559 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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NPR article

In his posts on X, Paul highlights a few select excerpts from Fauci's notes. For instance, he points to an entry on Jan. 26, 2020, not quite two months before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, where Fauci writes, "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."

Paul notes in his post, "The wet market was already off the table in [Fauci's] own private notes."

But in that same journal entry, Fauci adds, "Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."

Not quite a week later, in an entry penned on Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci listed the dozen researchers who participated in a conference call debating the origins of COVID-19. Specifically, they were talking about the plausibility that a key part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have evolved naturally.

According to his notes, only two of the scientists voiced support for a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. "The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible," he wrote, referring to the hypothesis that the virus was engineered in a lab.

In response to that passage, Paul wrote on X, "This was never a 50/50 room," suggesting that early scientific consensus considered a lab leak possible.

But Goodrum says that this meeting took place very early on, when scientists did not have as much data as they would later. The virologist points out that science is iterative and takes time to play out. What some of those scientists believed at the start gave way to a different consensus as more evidence emerged.

"We make the best conclusions we have with the data we have at the time, but then you're going to keep working," she says. "And then you're going to ultimately revise the original conclusions that you made. You will change your mind. That's absolutely fundamental to the way science is done. And it's something that Fauci wasn't really given any latitude to do."

Goodrum adds that it's possible that Fauci may have been less certain in private with his colleagues as they were racing to learn about the new virus than he was in public, where he had to assure a public panicking over the rapidly emerging pandemic.

Rand Paul press release

U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Chairman of the Senate HomelandSecurity and Governmental Affairs Committee, today released internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”—Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut. The messages, obtained as part of his ongoing COVID-19 origins investigation, are now available in The Reading Room at paul.senate.gov/readingroom.

The Proximal Origin paper, published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, was widely cited by public health officials and the media as the scientific authority for ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. The newly released messages show that behind closed doors, the paper’s own authors were far less certain than their public conclusions suggested.

In the messages, Andersen assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin. Holmes gave an estimate of 20%, later revising it down to 10%. Both numbers stand in direct contrast to the paper’s public assertion that there was no way the virus had been manipulated.

The documents also reveal extensive internal debate over the furin cleavage site, the genetic feature at the heart of the lab-leak question, with Andersen at one point telling colleagues that “some smoking(ish) guns” had emerged that made him “not comfortable,” and that he had “less confidence… at this stage.”

Separately, the messages show the authors coordinating directly with the U.S. intelligence community and NIH leadership during the same period they were publicly defending their conclusions. Andersen told his co-authors he expected to “have a handler” beginning that week as the intelligence community’s 90-day review was underway. Holmes repeatedly referenced a source in China he called “my spy.” Following the leak of the DARPA DEFUSE proposal, which detailed a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses, the group discussed the need to “stay off email” and to “carefully curate” their correspondence “for the FOI records,” while also noting the need to “get something back to Tony [Fauci]’s team at NIH.”

The release is part of Chairman Paul’s broader effort to make the underlying record of the COVID-19 origins investigation publicly available.

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