Rand Paul rages at ‘staggering’ media ‘know-nothingism,’ COVID cover-up

Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) new book Deception is exactly what you thought it would be: a thorough takedown of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his disciples for feeding America a full plate of COVID-19 mush over the past three years.

Tapping an extraordinary amount of research, he wrote that Fauci and the National Institutes of Health not only funded dangerous gain-of-function virus research at a Wuhan, China, lab but that Fauci knew it was the source of COVID-19 as early as February 2020 and spent years covering it up.

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“Fauci says he sleeps fine,” wrote Paul in the 524-page book published by Regnery. “In all likelihood, Fauci is lying — lying to himself, or the public, maybe both. His hubris and ego may not allow him to question his own role and responsibility even at 3:00 in the morning,” the Kentucky senator and ophthalmologist added.

But as important as getting in the last word after three years of sparring with Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over the origins of the coronavirus was highlighting the ignorance of the Washington press corps and its reluctance to question the “cult” of Fauci.

“The ignorance of today’s ‘journalists’ is staggering. They only know how to repeat the dogma fed to them,” Paul wrote in Deception: The Great COVID Cover-Up.

Paul’s criticism came from his personal experience with “media jackals” when he became the first senator to test positive for COVID-19 and after he returned to work following the recommended quarantine.

First, he wrote, reporters hit him for staying at work after he took his initial test despite having no symptoms and no test results for a week. “Lost on all these armchair ‘Karens,’ was the fact that if you count a stomach ache as a COVID symptom, it had been 10 days since I had any iota of illness,” he wrote.

Then, after returning from Kentucky following his COVID “sabbatical,” he encountered a “contagion of ‘know-nothingism’” from reporters.

“They barreled up to me with multiple masks on their twenty-something faces and demanded to know why I wasn’t wearing a mask,” the senator said. “I calmly explained to them that the benefit of having survived COVID-19 was that I now had immunity,” he added.

That didn’t sit well with the press. “The reporters, none of whom had a science degree (nor had any of them likely even passed an advanced science course), angrily and self-righteously excoriated me for my ‘ignorance’ and my ‘dangerous noncompliance,’” Paul wrote.

“Their eyes visible above their ‘BLM’ and ‘Trust Science’ masks only narrowed in angry and impotent disbelief,” he said.

Paul also hit the media’s blind faith in Fauci, whose emails show he panned masks as ineffective in preventing the spread of COVID-19.

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“Of course, while he was writing this privately, he was sanctimoniously lecturing me in a Senate hearing wearing a ridiculous Washington Nationals cloth mask. When I rightly called him out for his public health theater, he angrily and huffily denied that it was theater,” the Kentucky Republican said, adding, “I am still shocked at the childishly ignorant and emotional responses he gave, and by the media’s fawning response to it.”

If there is one lesson Paul wants learned from the crisis, it is to question authority. “I continue to be astonished at the lack of curiosity among Democrats and the mainstream media who for two years viewed COVID as such a great threat to humankind that it warranted the denial of civil liberties and education to millions of Americans. And now, they shrug their collective shoulders and ask us all to ‘move on.’ I, for one, will not,” he said.