Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Once again, a stunning, history-making development affecting every one of us demands a no-hot-takes briefing. Senator Rand Paul, the current champion of the covid accountability brigades, disclosed a thick tranche of never-before-seen, classified internal science communications implicating the top levels of the U.S. scientific and intelligence agencies. Let me show you something truly remarkable.
By Jeff Childers*
C&C has relentlessly savaged corporate media’s daily lies like a pit bull shaking a chicken for six long years, during the most revolting, dishonest, and frankly anti-human period of its sordid existence— ever since the first clever neanderthal scratched a rough self-portrait of his genitals onto a rock and passed it around the cave. The nineteenth century’s so-called “yellow journalists” were paragons of virtue compared to our current crop of woke diehards.
No enunciable epithets exist are sufficiently bitter to describe the permanent disdain owed our sold-out media at this point. As my saucy grandmother Jane Coon might have said, they’re gonna make us lose our witness.
So you’d think it was no longer possible for me to be surprised by media malfeasance. After they covered up covid, helped censor everyone else besides themselves, and paved the way for a deadly medical intervention that didn’t work but slew many —not to mention caressing their “International Man of Mystery” Jeffrey Epstein’s lower excretory aperture for decades— what further transgressions remained available to them? What fetishistic horrors had our reporting classes not already embraced as intimately as if they were lovers?
In other words, since they’re already standing on hell’s sub-basement floor, how much lower could the media possibly go?
Leave it to corporate media to find a way. Behold what could be Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) greatest career achievement. Three days ago, the Senator issued a press release titled, “NEW DOC DROP: Slack Messages Reveal Proximal Origin Authors Privately Doubted the Science Behind Their Own Paper, Coordinated with Intelligence Community And NIH.”
The newly released documents included never-before-seen transcripts of interviews with infamous bioresearcher Ralph Baric and over 1,100 internal Slack messages from Fauci’s hastily assembled Proximal Origins crisis management team of NIH-funded scientists. “The idea that it came from a lab is ‘implausible,’” Senator Paul explained, “and yet, privately they’re saying the opposite.”
It tells the story of how a broad conspiracy was born out of Trump derangement, butt-covering, and grant grifting. But the story is much, much more evil and twisted than that.
Senator Paul has published all these newly declassified documents on his nifty web page simply called the “Reading Room.”
💉 Once upon a time, in a magical land where bats allegedly flew hundreds of miles to mingle with pangolins in a strange wet market just blocks away from a high-security coronavirus research lab, a fairy tale was born. This fairy tale, lovingly crafted by the high priests of “The Science,™” assured everyone that Covid-19 was a purely natural phenomenon.
To suggest otherwise—to even whisper the words “lab leak”— was to out yourself as a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging conspiracy theorist who probably believed the Earth was flat and Reptile-men are breeding in the Lincoln bedroom. In May, 2021, for instance, New York Times health reporter Apoorva Mandavilla quipped, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.”
The crown jewel of this fairy tale, its fountainhead, was a sacred text known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine in March 2020— right out of the gate, as it were. Dr. Anthony Fauci, patron saint of the pandemic, waved this paper around like Moses descending from Mount Sinai with some important news from the top, declaring that the world’s smartest scientists had definitively ruled out any laboratory manipulation.
But as it turns out, the fairy tale was actually a grim, dark comedy. Thanks to Senator Rand Paul —one of the brave officials still doggedly pursuing covid accountability— we now have the receipts. And by receipts, I mean the private, unvarnished Slack messages of the very scientists who authored this sacred text, along with the newly released transcribed interview of Dr. Ralph Baric, the godfather of gain-of-function research.
Let’s set the stage. You remember. They were constantly assuring the public there was “no evidence” the virus was engineered. But privately? Oh, the drama! The intrigue. The sheer, unadulterated panic.
In these newly released Slack messages, in the parts they wrote down (while telling each other not to write stuff down), the authors privately assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin— months after they told the world such a thing was impossible.
Kristian Andersen, one of the lead public authors, was looking at the virus’s furin cleavage site —the genetic feature that makes the virus so exceptionally good at infecting humans— and was sweating bullets. In a paroxysm of passive voice, he confided to his colleagues that “some smoking(ish) guns” were starting to appear, making him “not comfortable.”
He admitted, “Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way’, but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.”
To the public, they said nothing. Nothing, that is, except “trust the science.” Uncurious corporate media helped them hold the whitewashing brush.
💉 And then came the DARPA DEFUSE proposal leak in September 2021, more than a year after the pandemic began. This document was a 2018 proposal from Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, along with Ralph Baric and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s very own “Bat Woman,” Shi Zhengli. Their brilliant idea? To insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses. You know, exactly what SARS-CoV-2 turned out to have.
When the authors of “Proximal Origin” saw this, did they rush to the press to correct the record? Did they alert the public that their natural origin theory might have a few engineered holes in it?
Of course not. They panicked. Which tells us everything.
💉 One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, saw DEFUSE and suggested they needed to figure out a strategy so they wouldn’t “get associated with these f—ers,” referring to what he called “the Baric/Daszak sh—show.”
Eddie Holmes called Peter Daszak a “jackass,” fuming that “it is very striking that a bat-derived CoV with an FCS turns up in a city that was on a grant proposing to muck around with FCSs (furin cleavage sites) in bat-derived CoVs.”
Kristian Andersen (correctly) referred to Baric as a “two-faced bastard.” Personally, I would have added “rat” before “bastard.” But hey, tastes vary. Then, he dropped the bombshell that completely changed the trajectory. Andersen suggested the team compare the DEFUSE proposal to the covid virus itself.
A short, shocked silence followed.
💉 With all this scientific brainpower focused on a common problem, what brilliant strategy did they invent to deal with this earth-shattering revelation? On September 21, 2021, Rambaut responded to Anderson’s suggestion with the elegance of a man who has absolutely nothing to hide: “Stay off email,” he exhorted the team, adding immediately, “Or, carefully curate some emails for the FOI records.”
How scientific! How progressive! How transparent! Nothing says “trust the science” quite like actively plotting to evade Freedom of Information Act requests about the single most urgent scientific issue facing the entire world. Which, I might add, provides ample evidence for a brave prosecutor to start indicting people, but let’s ‘circle back’ to that later.
💉 Meanwhile, the team’s Slack messages showed that from the jump, these so-called “independent” scientists were directly reporting to the U.S. intelligence community and Fauci’s team at the NIH. Andersen mentioned, “I also need to get something back to Tony’s team at NIH.” Tony’s team. Fauci again.
Holmes fretted about needing to “chat to the intelligence folk.” Their handlers.
And in an earlier message regarding a news report that intelligence agencies had concluded the virus wasn’t manmade, Andersen gloated, “Yes, yes, but our Great Leader sets the record straight with some clear language.”
The Great Leader? Anthony Forking Fauci. The context was crystal clear. The timing was precise. On the same day, April 30, 2020, Fauci had held a public press briefing citing the “Proximal Origin” paper and confidently declaring that the scientific evidence “strongly indicates” (weasel word alert) the virus evolved naturally. Andersen then posted a screenshot of Fauci’s statement (or possibly a headline) and called Fauci “our Great Leader” in an approving, sycophantic tone.
For context, “Great Leader” —especially capitalized— is what North Koreans call Kim Jong-un. It was what Soviet bloc citizens called their party chiefs. Not a great look.
When your Great Leader needs a paper to say a certain thing, and you privately have doubts, the frictionless path is to goose-step, let the Great Leader set the record straight, and keep your silly doubts in the Slack channel and “off of email.” After all, in June, 2021, Fauci soberly informed Chuck Todd, referring to himself in the royal third person, “You are really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you are attacking science.”
By itself, that butt-smooching title proved that the relationship between Fauci and the “Proximal Origin” authors was not just the relationship between a government official and independent scientists. It was the relationship between a patron and his clients. Fauci needed a paper; the scientists needed their Great Leader’s goodwill for their grants. The paper was the transaction’s currency.
The whole thing reads less like a scientific inquiry and more like a rejected script for a Jason Bourne movie directed by the Dumb & Dumber team.
💉 Then the plot coagulated like a Scottish blood sausage, thickened by Senator Paul’s newly released April 2026 interview. Enter corpulent Dr. Ralph Baric. Dr. Baric —keenly aware of the perjury trap opening under his feet— confirmed under oath that, if the DEFUSE proposal had been funded, the step of inserting the furin cleavage site into the viral backbone “would be done by me.”
It’s not his first rodeo. Headline from Vanity Fair, May 2024:
In his new testimony, Baric went much further than his 2024 testimony, exploding the central scientific argument of the “Proximal Origin” paper. The paper claimed the virus couldn’t have been engineered because it didn’t grip human cells “ideally.” But Baric testified he had run an experiment years earlier proving that, if a virus grips too tightly, it gets stuck and can’t spread.
A smart virologist would therefore deliberately avoid the “ideal” grip— meaning the very feature Fauci’s team called proof of natural origins is something any decent bioweapons engineer would choose on purpose.
Contradicting previous claims, Baric also admitted for the first time that he did attend the secret February 1, 2020, initial conference call where Fauci organized the “Proximal Origin” strike team. Though he hilariously claimed, “I couldn’t find how I knew about the meeting,” and gave conflicting accounts of whether he even spoke.
Maybe he pocket-dialed into the meeting.
💉 Oh, and Dr. Baric —who moonlighted as a paid ‘biodefense advisor’ to the U.S. intelligence community— admitted he’d sent his U.S. taxpayer-funded mouse models to the Wuhan lab. When China later tried to sell those models back to American scientists, an offended Baric complained, “What kind of crap is this? This is not ethical behavior.”
You cannot script that kind of irony.
💉 And where is the corporate media in all of this now? The same media that spent years hyperventilating over every precious syllable farted out of Fauci’s ugly face hole? Are they filled with righteous outrage, since they were played for fools by a clique of sold-out scientists on the grift? Are they now getting their well-deserved revenge by platforming Senator Paul’s newly disclosed documents?
Nope.
They are remarkably, stunningly silent. It’s radio silence, dead air, over at the Times (or any other corporate media outlet). Zero outrage, zero surprise, zero anything. Not even mild indigestion. On Reddit, the woke hall monitors are busy trying to get the disclosure story banned for not coming from a “reputable” source— because apparently, direct quotes from the scientists themselves aren’t reputable unless they’re filtered through the New York Times’s spin cycle.
It’s a nifty trick to designate the Times as the metric for what’s allowed on Reddit, knowing full well the Times wouldn’t touch the story with a ten-foot-long vaccine mixing stick.
💉 Next week, on July 29, Dr. Fauci will finally be dragged back in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee by Rand Paul— under subpoena, because Fauci declined to come voluntarily. Fauci is a sturdy little cockroach. He will undoubtedly spin, deflect, and redefine the term “gain-of-function” for the hundredth time.
“‘Gain of function’ is a very nebulous term,” Fauci told the Senate on November 4, 2021. Yes, now it is, apparently. Then, not so much.
But the Slack messages and Baric’s sworn testimony are evidence. So Fauci, one of the hardiest and most resilient bureaucrats ever created by the satanic forces in Mount Doom’s sinister underground lair, faces a new problem: Senator Paul has a simple goal: just get Fauci to lie under oath and on the record. Then it’ll be orange jumpsuit time.
A message-by-message tally of the released Slack channel shows that, between the ‘independent’ group’s February launch and the publication of their “Proximal Origins” paper, the scientists’ Slack channel devoted only about 25% of their chatter to science —all attempting to disprove lab origins— and 75% to spin, narrative management, reactions, and cover-up planning.
After that, and especially after the DEFUSE proposal surfaced in September, 2021, nearly 100% of the group’s messages were focused on narrative management, butt-covering, and taking the discussion offline. They almost completely stopped following anything resembling science. They became a crisis PR team wearing lab coats.
💉 Seven million people died from covid in the official count. The true excess mortality figure is estimated at fifteen to twenty million. We can argue about those numbers. But the global economy indisputably lost trillions of dollars. Children lost years of schooling. The elderly died alone. Businesses were destroyed. The social fabric of every country on earth was damaged in ways that are still being calculated. And don’t even get me started about the warp-sped jabs.
Maybe the blame cannot rest entirely at the feet of a dishonest paper. The virus, regardless of origin, would have spread. Pandemics are not prevented by accurate scientific papers. But the response to the pandemic —the policies, the research priorities, the international cooperation, the accountability mechanisms— all of that was shaped by a false certainty that “Proximal Origin” provided.
A world that had known in March 2020 what Andersen privately believed —that there was a 30% chance this came from a lab— would certainly have responded differently in ways that are impossible to fully quantify but almost certainly would have saved lives. Maybe a lot of lives.
The scientists who wrote “Proximal Origin” did not just lie about this pandemic. They burned down the house of institutional scientific trust that might have been helpful for every public health crisis that follows.
That is the cost that cannot be calculated in dollars or death counts. It is the cost that the next generation will pay, in the next real or lab-leaked pandemic, when we flat refuse to believe the experts— and this time, we will have very good reasons not to.
💉 The high priests of the “natural origin” narrative knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the lab leak was plausible, if not probable. They knew about the Baric-Daszak-Zhengli DEFUSE proposal with the furin cleavage site idea. And yet they chose to lie to the American people, to protect their funding, their reputations, and the hallowed integrity of their real god, “Science.™”
Once upon a time, we were told to trust the experts. But more of us should have trusted our common sense and not fairy tales about bats and pangolins.
💉 I’ll conclude with this: however tempting, don’t swallow the black pill. The overwhelming urge will be to lean into the careworn complaint that yeah, this is great but nothing ever happens. Nobody ever gets arrested.
First of all, it’s simply not true that nothing has happened. Thousands of corrupt career scientists have been fired. Anti-vaxxers are no longer kooks to a substantial minority, maybe a bare majority, of the country. Washington Post headline, December 2025:
But most of all: accountability for a scandal of this magnitude is not a sprint. It’s a triathlon.
To be perfectly fair, the blackpilled cynics are not wrong about the classic pattern. We have watched the Obamas, the Clintons, the Bidens, the Comeys, and the Brennans skate for years while the machinery of accountability ground slowly, visibly, and apparently pointlessly. The blackpill reflex is forgivable.
It is also, in this case, wrong about where we actually are.
💉 The first stage of accountability for a scandal of this magnitude is not prosecution. It is revelation, which is not a consolation prize. It is the first lap, the slow, grinding, document-by-document, deposition-by-deposition process of establishing what actually happened. The wheels of justice turn slowly. But they turn inexorably.
That process, for covid’s origins, has been slowly grinding for five years— and now, capped by these Slack messages and the Baric testimony, are nearing completion. We know what happened. We know who did it. We know what they said in private versus what they said in public. The factual record is being carefully assembled in sworn testimony and primary source documents that were never meant to see the antiseptic rays of daylight and that can never be walked back. That leg of the race is essentially done.
The second stage is institutional consequence— the kind of broad accountability that does not turn on any individual criminal conviction but permanently reshapes the entire landscape. And here, the cynics are simply factually wrong to say nothing has happened.
The NIH’s gain-of-function research framework has been restructured. EcoHealth Alliance has been defunded and debarred. Peter Daszak’s organization —the financial conduit between U.S. taxpayer dollars and the Wuhan lab— no longer exists as a functioning entity. Thousands of federal health bureaucrats have gotten their pink slips and billions in science grants have been cut or canceled— meaning private-sector scientists are also getting fired or hit in the pocketbook. Headline from Government Executive, March 2026:
The FDA, CDC, and NIH have been reorganized in ways that would have been politically unthinkable in 2019. The “Proximal Origin” paper itself has been effectively destroyed as a scientific document— not formally retracted, not yet, but treated by every serious scientist as a political artifact rather than a scientific one. Francis Collins has resigned. Fauci has retired, is under subpoena, and will sit across a table from Rand Paul next Wednesday.
That is not ‘nothing.’ In historical terms, for a scandal of this complexity involving this many powerful institutions, that is an extraordinary amount of accountability in an extraordinarily short time.
The honest truth is that criminal prosecution for conduct of this kind, involving scientists, federal agencies, classified intelligence community coordination, not to mention a vast map of events that spanned the entire world, takes a decade minimum.
The Iran-Contra prosecutions began in 1986, and the investigation didn’t close until 1994. The savings and loan prosecutions of the 1980s produced over a thousand convictions, but the last major case wasn’t resolved until the mid-1990s. The financial crisis prosecutions from 2008 are still ongoing.
Covid origins is more complicated than any of those. A lot more. The conduct spans multiple countries, multiple agencies, multiple layers of classification, and multiple scientific disciplines. The paper trail has been deliberately obscured. The key witnesses are foreign nationals. The legal theories are novel. And the investigation is being conducted by a Senate committee, not a grand jury— which means the evidentiary record being built now is becoming the foundation for future criminal referrals that haven’t happened yet.
Senator Paul’s Slack messages are not the end of the story. They are the end of the denial phase of the story. For five years, the hardened official position was that the lab leak hypothesis was a conspiracy theory promoted by cranks and partisans. That position is now untenable. The scientists who wrote the paper sustaining that position have been exposed, in their own words, to have privately believed the exact opposite of what they publicly stated. Ruh roh.
The Slack messages have slammed open the Overton window on covid origins from one end to the other in a single news cycle. The scientists are no longer defending their conclusions— they are now defending their characters. That is a fundamentally different fight, and it is one they are going to lose — not in a courtroom, necessarily, and not on any particular timetable, but in the only court that ultimately matters for a scandal of this kind: the court of history.
The timing, as we enter midterm campaign season, seems unlikely to be coincidental. Every Democrat who spent six years calling this a racist conspiracy theory now faces all-new political problems. Were they part of the cover-up? Or just stupid? Should they keep denying it? There are no good options.
The triathlon is not over. But the swimmer has left the water.
>
