Last week I published a long article summarizing my controversial Covid origins analysis, prompted by the fourth anniversary of my first piece in that series.

Although the Covid epidemic has largely faded from the headlines, the consequences have been enormous, with well over a million Americans dying from the disease, along with tens of millions worldwide. The lives of many billions were greatly disrupted for years and our own government spent some $10 trillion to avert a total economic collapse, raising our national debt to its highest peak since the end of World War II. That comparison is an appropriate one since I would argue that the Covid outbreak was probably the most momentous world event since that titanic military conflict of the 1940s and impacted more lives around the world than anything else in the three generations that followed.

During the last few years I had published some two dozen major articles on that topic, all arguing that there was strong even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic had been caused by the blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and I have stood almost alone on the Internet in proclaiming that extremely controversial hypothesis. Although my recent piece was quite long, it was essentially a review of my past arguments with very little new material presented, so it consisted almost entirely of excerpts or recapitulations of what I had previously written on that subject.

One of the very few new items was a brief discussion of a recent Rand Paul podcast interview, which had partly focused on the Covid origins issue. Sen. Paul has been a strong advocate of the lab-leak theory but seemed completely unaware of any of the powerful contrary arguments and his very one-sided analysis partly prompted me to produce my own article. I also discovered that last year he’d published an entire book on the topic, so I quickly ordered and read it.

Like his own father Ron, Rand Paul is a medical doctor by training, and the bulk of his text presented his perspective on the dangers of the new viral disease and the highly-controversial public health measures deployed to control it, including lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations. Although I have devoted little effort to investigating these matters, many of his positions seemed persuasive or at least reasonable to me, and I often already held them.

For example, it quickly became clear that the dangers of a Covid infection were very sharply skewed by age, with the death rate for those over 60 being more than 100x times greater than those under 40, and children or youths being almost totally immune from any ill effects. At the beginning of Paul’s last chapter, he helpfully quoted the relative mortality table of Harvard biostatistician Prof. Martin Kulldorff, released by April 2020:

Once the vaccines became available studies soon revealed that they were relatively ineffective in preventing infection or transmission, so their primary value lay in greatly reducing the risk of serious illness and death. Therefore, vaccinating younger age cohorts was unnecessary and probably dangerously counter-productive considering the significant adverse health risks of a vaccine which was based upon an entirely new biotechnology and had been rushed into release without the unusual lengthy clinical trials. Paul claimed that the vaccination mortality rate was 4 in 10,000, extremely high for any vaccine, and I have no reason to doubt his figures.

Obviously, that risk was just a small fraction of the average Covid morality rate of 50 to 100 per 10,000; but that latter figure was very heavily skewed by the elderly, so vaccinating those younger than 50 was probably ill-advised, and even perhaps even those below 60 would have been better off avoiding the jab. Meanwhile, the widespread pressure for the massive vaxxing and boosting of children made absolutely no logical sense and was probably driven more by ideology, hysteria, and pharmaceutical lobbying than any valid scientific reasoning.

Paul also made a strong case that since Covid infections produced far higher levels of antibodies compared to vaccinations there was no reason for vaccinating those who had already gained immunity the natural way.

Some of his arguments regarding other public health measures seemed also seemed plausible if not necessarily conclusive. He argued that masking was completely ineffective since the size of the viral particles was so small relative to the filtration of the mask, but the rejoinder made by proponents at the time was that the viral particles were usually embedded in much larger water droplets and these were successfully filtered out by masks. So the argument became an empirical one and during 2020 and 2021 I remember reading several conflicting studies without personally coming to any solid conclusion. However, the fact that the East Asian countries very heavily emphasized masking and also proved far more successful in controlling their own Covid outbreaks should not be ignored.

Similarly, America’s year or two of intermittent lockdowns provoked enormous opposition from conservatives and libertarians, and Paul was very skeptical that they provided any benefits. Although I felt that they were probably justified during the earliest weeks of the outbreak before the true fatality rates and other factors were well understood, I tended to agree with him that our haphazard and fragmentary lockdowns had little positive impact. In support, he cited some evidence demonstrating that those states most energetically implementing lockdowns fared little better in overall health outcomes than those that followed the opposite policy.

However, China’s extremely strict lockdowns were successful in completely stamping out the virus, allowing daily life in the entire country to completely return to normal after just a few weeks while most Americans suffered from intermittent lockdowns and other major disruptions in their lives for the next year or two. Only the appearance of the ultra-contagious (but very mild) Omicron variant finally overwhelmed China’s public health measures, soon forcing the PRC government to abandon its effort and allow the relatively mild virus to infect its entire population. But the end result was that most American experienced far greater disruption in their lives than the vast majority of Chinese, while also suffering a death rate roughly three times greater. So the moral of that story seems to be that effective, Chinese-style lockdowns actually worked quite well, while ineffective American-style lockdowns produced the worst of both worlds, a combination of much more severe social disruption and also far higher death rates.

Paul also argued that closing schools made no sense since Covid infections posed little risk to children. But here I would sharply disagree with him since the argument made was students might pick up Covid infections from their classmates and take those home, spreading the virus to their families and perhaps endangering their grandparents or other older relatives. So the efficacy of closing the schools was merely part of the broader lockdown question.

Different individuals focus on different issues. I lack Paul’s medical expertise and unlike him, I only took a slight in the bitter public health disputes that were his central focus, so all verdicts on his conclusions, whether positive or negative, should be taken with a large grain of salt.

But I think the opposite situation applies with regard to the origin of the Covid virus. That issue had been my central focus from the very earliest days of the outbreak, while Paul emphasized towards the beginning of his book that he had little interest in that topic and merely followed and apparently accepted the mainstream media coverage for the first 16 months of the epidemic, up until May 2021:

I read news reports of scientists that concluded COVID-19 came from animals just like SARS and MERS had. I didn’t give it a second thought, that is, until I came across Nicholas Wade’s amazing article on the subject, self-published on Medium.com.

However, I think Paul may be glossing over some important facts in his account. As a conservative/libertarian Republican, he surely must have noticed the enormous wave of “Covid conspiracy theories” that dominated that ideological sector of the Internet almost from the moment the Wuhan outbreak began. As I explained in my original April 2020 article:

Back in January, few Americans were paying much attention to the early reports of an unusual disease outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which was hardly a household name. Instead, overwhelming political attention was focused on the battle over Trump’s impeachment and the aftermath of our dangerous military confrontation with Iran. But towards the end of that month, I discovered that the fringes of the Internet were awash with claims that the disease was caused by a Chinese bioweapon accidentally released from that same Wuhan laboratory, with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and ZeroHedge, a popular right-wing conspiracy-website, playing leading roles in advancing the theory. Indeed, the stories became so widespread in those ideological circles that Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading Republican Neocon, began promoting them on Twitter and FoxNews, thereby provoking an article in the NYT on those “fringe conspiracy theories.”

Indeed, exactly 200 pages after describing his initial lack of interest in the Covid origins issue, Paul denounced the Washington Post for having “blasted” Sen. Cotton in February 2020 for suggesting that Covid had leaked from the Wuhan lab, arguing that his Republican colleague had been vindicated by the publication of Wade’s seminal article in mid-2021:

Even the Washington Post—not famous for introspection and self-correction—reversed course…The Post had smeared Cotton’s suggestions as “conspiracy theory”—the standard left-wing attack tactic where facts be damned and name-calling is sufficient.

Thus, Paul was almost certainly well aware of the widespread early claims among right-wingers that Covid had leaked from the Wuhan lab, but he had apparently dismissed that idea at the time, instead accepting the uniform mainstream media narrative that Covid was a natural virus. So when he later discovered that he had been hoodwinked by a media propaganda-bubble and many of the scientists whose public statements he had taken at face value had privately believed something very different, he naturally reacted by becoming a leading proponent of the lab-leak theory, which he regarded as the only alternative. But as I have repeatedly pointed out, there was actually a third possibility, almost totally ignored by both the mainstream and alternative media:

For more than 30 months I have emphasized that there are actually three perfectly plausible hypotheses for the Covid outbreak. The virus might have been natural, randomly appearing in Wuhan during late 2019; the virus might have been the artificial product of a scientific lab in Wuhan, which accidentally leaked out at that time; or the virus might have been the bioengineered product of America’s hundred-billion-dollar biowarfare program, the oldest and largest in the world, a bioweapon deployed against China and Iran by elements of the Trump Administration at the height of our hostile international confrontation with those countries.

The first two possibilities have been very widely discussed and debated across the Western mainstream and alternative media, while the third has been almost totally ignored…

Unfortunately, since none of his staffers, colleagues, or media sources had probably ever considered that excluded third possibility, Paul seems to have entirely missed the important early clues that briefly appeared during the first year of the outbreak. Although these items were reported in the mainstream media, they quickly vanished, never to be revisited, and therefore might have been easily missed by anyone not already primed to recognize their significance.

As a physician and an important elected official, Paul was naturally focused upon the horrific consequences of America’s Covid epidemic and the controversial public health measures intended to control it, so he cannot be blamed for missing some of those other items that I soon made the centerpiece of my own analysis. I was hardly surprised that none of the important facts emphasized in my original April 2020 article were mentioned anywhere in Paul’s 500 page book.

During January, the journalists reporting on China’s mushrooming health crisis regularly emphasized that the mysterious new viral outbreak had occurred at the worst possible place and time, appearing in the major transport hub of Wuhan just prior to the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese would normally travel to their distant family homes for the celebration, thereby potentially spreading the disease to all parts of the country and producing a permanent, uncontrollable epidemic.

…during the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered serious blows from other mysterious new diseases, although these had targeted farm animals rather than people. During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating large portions of China’s poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had devastated China’s pig farms, destroying 40% of the nation’s primary domestic source of meat, with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious small drones. My morning newspapers had hardly ignored these important business stories, noting that the sudden collapse of much of China’s domestic food production might prove a huge boon to American farm exports at the height of our trade conflict, but I had never considered the obvious implications. So for three years in a row, China had been severely impacted by strange new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans. This evidence was merely circumstantial, but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.

…shortly before the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, that city had hosted 300 visiting American military officers, who came to participate in the 2019 Military World Games, an absolutely remarkable coincidence of timing. As I pointed out at the time, how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had paid an extended visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had suddenly broken out in that city? Once again, the evidence was merely circumstantial but certainly raised dark suspicions.

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hated Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

Furthermore, Paul seemed completely unaware that the lab-leak theory and many of his other arguments can actually be traced back to a suspiciously early American propaganda campaign linked to the CIA, an effort that began almost simultaneously with the Covid outbreak itself. As I explained last week:

Soon afterward, I discovered that many of the Covid theories promoted by these right-wing, anti-China activists apparently had their roots in American government propaganda efforts. As early as January 9th, before even a single Covid death had been officially reported, our CIA-associated Radio Free Asia outlet had begun running stories that Covid might be a Chinese bioweapon that had leaked from the Wuhan lab, and a couple of weeks later the right-wing Washington Times picked up on the same story, quoting unnamed U.S. government officials who seemed to lend it credence.

One of Paul’s key sources seems to have been Dr. Robert Kadlec, whom he describes as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness in the Trump Administration and head of the Pandemic Committee, and who then went on to spend eighteen months investigating the origins of Covid for Paul’s own Senate Committee. But Paul appears not to realize that Kadlec’s own background and activities immediately prior to the Covid outbreak raise very serious questions as I’d previously explained.

For example, in that same long 2021 article I’d noted that in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates. The following year a mysterious 2018 viral epidemic hit China’s poultry industry and another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China’s pork industry in 2019…

From the earliest days of the administration, leading Trump officials had regarded China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary, and orchestrated a policy of confrontation. Then from January to August 2019, Kadlec’s department ran the “Crimson Contagion” simulation exercise, involving the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory viral disease in China, which eventually spreads into the United States, with the participants focusing on the necessary measures to control it in this country. As one of America’s foremost biowarfare experts, Kadlec had emphasized the unique effectiveness of bioweapons as far back as the late 1990s and we must commend him for his considerable prescience in having organized a major viral epidemic exercise in 2019 that was so remarkably similar to what actually began in the real world just a few months later.

Although the account of the Crimson Contagion exercise had appeared as a major 3,000 word article on the front page of the New York Times during March 2020, the story then immediately disappeared from all subsequent media coverage and was never mentioned anywhere in Paul’s book. The Senator apparently worked closely with Kadlec for eighteen months on his committee, relying upon him to investigate the origins of Covid. But there is no indication that Kadlec was ever asked what had prompted him to spend eight full months leading a massive federal/state exercise in preparation for the hypothetical appearance of a Covid-like virus in China just before that same development suddenly occurred in the real world.

Despite his strong libertarian principles, Paul holds a seat in the U.S. Senate as a conservative Republican, so it is only natural that he has absorbed many of the beliefs of his caucus, including their intense demonization of China. For example, his book on three separate occasions cites the notorious Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 as demonstrating the cruelty and dishonesty of China’s Communist regime, and Paul even quotes Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Trump’s leading China hawk, who has on occasion claimed that up to 10,000 innocent Chinese civilians were killed in that supposedly brutal crackdown. But as I pointed out in my original Covid article, that alleged massacre probably never happened and was merely an American propaganda-hoax promoted to vilify China. This demonstrates that the statements of our own government and media should be treated with considerable caution.

Although nearly all of Paul’s book was written in suitably sober fashion, I noticed that at the very beginning the half-dozen pages of his Preface and Introduction were filled with the sort of unsubstantiated and highly “conspiratorial” accusations against China’s government that are wildly popular in right-wing circles, and his may have helped to ensure that his work received glowing endorsements from prominent FoxNews pundits Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. For example, Paul claimed that a certain Wuhan lab researcher named Huang Yanling had been involved in the Covid lab-leak and was to “ultimately go missing.” Although this conspiratorial tale became widespread among right-wing Republicans during early 2020, Philippe Lemoine demonstrated in a long article published in Quillette that it seemed to merely be an Internet hoax.

Similarly, Chinese ophthamologist Li Wenliang mistakenly reported Covid as an outbreak of deadly SARS and was reprimanded for his panic-mongering by local government officials but subsequently lionized on Chinese social media as a whistle-blowing hero. Li soon became one of many Chinese medical workers to die of Covid in February 2020 and was awarded a posthumous medal for his heroism, but Paul unreasonably suggests that he was actually murdered by the vengeful Chinese government. Paul also seems to accept unconfirmed U.S. intelligence claims that senior Chinese scientist Yusen Zhou died under “mysterious circumstances” in May 2020, though given China’s raging Covid epidemic, his death may have had a simple explanation.

All these conspiratorial incidents that Paul accepts and reports were based upon extremely thin and fragmentary evidence. So I suspect that if Paul discovered that the ultra-high-profile Tiananmen Square Massacre, which he had never questioned in 35 years, had merely been a propaganda-hoax that our government and media had steadfastly maintained for more than three decades, he would quickly discount all those other stories.

Paul’s assumption of sinister Chinese behavior also heavily colored his interpretation of some important facts in the account of Jeremy Farrar, a British M.D./Ph.D. who was a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and then served as CEO of the Wellcome Trust, perhaps the world’s leading funder of biomedical research.

In July 2021 Farrar had published a short book on the early months of the Covid outbreak. Although Paul obviously disagreed with Farrar’s emphatically mainstream views on the efficacy of lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations, he treated the scientist very respectfully and heavily cited his revelations, which constituted the candid account of a true insider to those momentous events. I’d also been quite impressed with Farrar’s material and in late 2022 I had briefly discussed his interesting book:

Jeremy Farrar served as Director of Britain’s Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest funders of public health projects, and he played a crucial role in organizing the immediate measures taken to contain the Covid epidemic. Spike, co-authored by journalist Anjana Ahuja, is his short narrative account of those important events beginning in the last days of 2019, and it provides the useful perspective of a leading insider. I was also particularly interested to discover that Wellcome’s chair was the former head of MI-5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, who may have helped provide the author with some important insights on certain matters.

In his account, Farrar repeatedly emphasized that the Covid outbreak had hit China at the absolute worst possible time, appearing on the eve of Chinese Lunar New Year, when 450 million Chinese might be traveling. This seemed likely to spread the disease to every corner of the huge country, and that gigantic, looming disaster was only averted by an immediate public health lockdown unprecedented in all of human history.

Farrar is the most respectable of establishmentarian figures, and I was surprised to discover that in the early days of the epidemic he and his circle of leading scientific experts freely discussed whether the virus had been bioengineered, with some of them thinking that likely, and he even mentioned the speculation that it might have been a bioweapon, deliberately released. But as the practical needs of the terrible public health crisis facing Britain and the rest of the West began absorbing all of his concentration, these theoretical issues understandably faded from their discussions.

However, Paul focused upon certain elements of Farrar’s narrative that I’d failed to properly appreciate:

Farrar recounts that “by the second week in January [2020], I was beginning to realize the scale of what was happening. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets.”

Farrar’s wife, Christiane, insists that he ring “people close to us, so they would understand what was going on in case anything happened to [you]” …Farrar also told his brother that British and American intelligence agencies were in the loop…Farrar painted a dangerous scenario: “‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,’ I told them nervously, ‘this is what you need to know.'”

Based upon Paul’s interesting excerpts, I decided to reread Farrar’s book, focusing especially upon the earliest chapters, and drew some important conclusions.

Paul had been puzzled by some of Farrar’s striking statements, wondering whether the scientist was fearful that the Chinese government could somehow reach out and do him harm in Britain, but my own interpretation was quite different. Farrar emphasized that in those early days he and many other top researchers were convinced that the virus had been bioengineered in a laboratory. He also speculated that it might have been deliberately released, striking China at the worst possible place and time, in the major transit hub of Wuhan just before the Lunar New Year travels, and even raised the possibility that this sort of incident could lead to a world war. Just as Paul claimed, he repeatedly expressed considerable fears for his own personal safety and actually entitled his first chapter “If Anything Happens to Me…”

The Wellcome chair was Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of Britain’s MI5 secret intelligence service, and Farrar discussed the alarming situation both with her and with Andrew Parker, her MI5 successor:

When I told Eliza about the suspicions over the origins of the new coronavirus, she advised that everyone involved in the delicate conversations should raise our guard, security-wise. We should use different phones; avoid putting things in emails; and ditch our normal email addresses and phone contacts.

Farrar was shocked by those suggestions and even included a copy of the urgent email he sent to his staff requesting they provision him with a second, “burner” phone. But the date of that note immediately jumped out at me.

Paul has probably forgotten that in late January 2020, a dawn raid by the FBI suddenly arrested Prof. Charles Lieber, one of Harvard University’s top scientists and Chairman of its Chemistry Department, someone characterized as a potential future Nobel Laureate. Prof. Lieber had long had close research ties with China and was an expert on virology, and although the charges against him were extremely obscure—alleged reporting violations in the disclosure portions of his government grant applications—he was dragged off to prison in shackles and threatened with many years of federal incarceration. As I speculated in my original April 2020 article:

But I think a far more likely possibility is that Lieber began to wonder whether the epidemic in China might not be the result of an American biowarfare attack, and was perhaps a little too free in voicing his suspicions, thereby drawing the wrath of our national security establishment. Inflicting such extremely harsh treatment upon a top Harvard scientist would greatly intimidate all of his lesser colleagues elsewhere, who would surely now think twice before broaching certain controversial theories to any journalist.

It may be more than pure coincidence that Farrar’s urgent request for a “burner” phone was sent almost simultaneously with Lieber’s sudden arrest. Unlike Paul, I very much doubt that Farrar was worried that the Chinese secret police could somehow threaten his safety in Britain. But other intelligence services might indeed constitute a very serious threat, especially if the private speculations of Farrar and his colleagues had extended far beyond the fleeting references he later published in Spike.

Much later in his book, Paul also brought another important fact to my attention that I’d somehow previously missed. Unlike SARS and many other diseases, pre-symptomatic Covid cases were highly infectious and 30-40% of asymptomatic victims were also contagious, so only difficult, mass-testing was able to contain a local outbreak. According to Dr. Steven Quay, those characteristics were apparently due to certain rather unusual aspects of the Covid virus and the proteins that it synthesized, and Quay stated that he was “aware of no other new respiratory virus that is asymptomatic when it first entered the human population.” Such properties would obviously be ideal in a bioweapon.

In that same chapter and the following one, Paul cited an additional book on the origins of the Covid epidemic by Canadian journalist Elaine Dewar that I’d somehow missed, so I ordered and read it.

Published in 2021, On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation was a relatively short paperback, apparently released by a very small press and inconveniently lacking both chapter headings and any index. Dewar was a long-time free-lance writer, and she spent her 2020 lockdowns becoming more and more intrigued by the origins of Covid, gradually accumulating a huge collection of newsclips and Internet web-pages on the topic.

Much like Paul, she seemed intensely suspicious of China and hostile to its government, believing that many of the Chinese students and scholars at Canadian universities and research institutes probably had military ties and were involved in espionage. As with so many other Westerners, she repeatedly pointed to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre hoax as proof of Chinese government malevolence. In late 2018 her government had arrested one of China’s most important technology executives who was changing planes in a Canadian airport for extradition to America on charges of violating our unilateral trade sanctions on Iran, and Dewar seemed outraged that the Chinese soon arrested two Canadian businessmen living in their own country in retaliation.

China’s extremely forceful public health measures soon stamped out the virus in that country, limiting the number of fatalities to just a few thousand, but like many other Westerners, Dewar found it impossible to accept this embarrassing contrast between Chinese success and the concurrent disastrous public health failures in Canada, the U.S., and most of Europe. Therefore, she gullibly repeated American propaganda that the Chinese government was concealing enormous numbers of Covid deaths, failing to consider that most other East Asian countries as well as Australia and New Zealand had done just as well as China.

She sometimes ignored rather telling facts that failed to conform to her framework. For example, Canada had a very large Chinese population so it was hardly surprising that most of the early cases appeared in individuals returning from trips to that country. But she noted with considerable surprise that one of the first Covid cases in Vancouver was diagnosed in a woman returning from a mid-February trip to Iran, indicating how early that country’s outbreak must have begun. Perhaps if she had been less convinced of China’s villainy, she might have noticed that the first two outbreaks in the world began in China and Iran, the two countries that were the greatest targets of American hostility.

Along with Paul, Dewar also took very seriously an anonymous private report claiming that cellphone activity had disappeared in a high-security portion of the Wuhan lab during a couple of weeks in mid-October 2019, implying that it had been shut down due to a lab-leak. But I think this demonstrates a total lack of common sense by both those individuals and the many others who promoted that story when it appeared. After all, Mike Pompeo and the rest of the American government were then making every possible effort to prove that a Wuhan lab-leak had been responsible for the Covid outbreak, and our own NSA obviously possessed vastly superior access to such cellphone activity data than any random private researcher, so if our officials never attempted to make that claim, it was obviously false. Indeed, when NBC News broke the story, the reporters emphasized that both US and UK intelligence agencies had already investigated that theory and failed to confirm it.

But although I was far from impressed by Dewar’s knowledge or her thoughtfulness, I found some aspects of her book quite useful. Among other things, she provided a basic, continuous narrative of the first year or so of the Covid epidemic, refreshing my memory of developments that I had long since forgotten. Towards the end of her text, she also provided a good description of DRASTIC, the group of Twitter-based Internet activists and researchers who played a major role in compiling the early evidence that Covid had been bioengineered in a lab rather than found in nature, also fingering China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology as the likeliest source. Her bias on that score seemed quite strong, but the information was still useful to me.

Just like Paul and virtually every other advocate of the lab-leak hypothesis, Dewar seemed to have never even considered the possibility of an American biowarfare attack and was totally unaware of the strong evidence pointing in that direction, such as the secret DIA report in November 2019 or the Crimson Contagion exercise earlier that same year. On a couple of occasions, she briefly mentioned that the Chinese government had suggested that the Covid virus might have been carried to Wuhan by the 300 U.S. military servicemen visited the city at exactly the time that the virus appeared, but she casually dismissed that possibility as ridiculous Communist propaganda.

Sen. Rand Paul is certainly one of the leading elected officials challenging the establishment position on vaxxing and other Covid public health measures as well as advocating the lab-leak theory. But in reading his long and comprehensive book, I noticed something quite odd. There was absolutely no mention anywhere of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., probably America’s single most prominent proponent of those same positions, whose massively popular #1 Amazon bestseller The Real Anthony Fauci had been the core text of the entire movement. Although they sharply differed on other ideological matters, I regarded them as quite closely aligned on Covid issues, and with Kennedy now being a serious independent candidate for the Presidency, his visibility would only increase. But perhaps some of Kennedy’s more extreme ideas and the controversy they provoked had led Paul to carefully avoid mentioning his name.

Since I had been quite skeptical of the Covid anti-vaxxing movement, when Kennedy’s book was released in late 2021, I’d initially paid no attention. But someone convinced me to read it and I was very glad that I did, discovering that most of it had nothing to do with Covid but instead provided an extremely convincing analysis of other controversial medical ideas I’d never previously considered. My own long, very favorable review attracted a great deal of readership and was highlighted on one of Kennedy’s own websites.

Soon after I finished it, I discovered that Kennedy already had a sequel on Covid origins in the pipeline, scheduled for release in mid-2022, so I immediately pre-ordered it on Amazon. However, the release date was delayed over and over again, and it only finally appeared at the end of 2023. Unfortunately for the author, Covid was no longer a hot topic and the book never seems to have attracted even a fraction of the attention or sales of his previous volume. The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race was very long and detailed, running nearly 600 pages and nearly 3,500 endnotes, but although I read it upon release, I wasn’t impressed so I didn’t bother discussing it at the time.

The explosive issue of biowarfare was the central theme of his book, and just a few months earlier, Kennedy had made some incendiary public remarks at a private dinner that provoked a media firestorm and also revealed himself to be quite credulous on that important topic.

Although some of the attacks against him were obviously unfair, a couple of his quotes easily explained the explosive media reaction:

COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese…We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.

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