Rand Paul vows to investigate ‘covid coverup’ as Senate panel’s new chair

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) on Thursday announced he would lead the Senate's government oversight panel and prioritize investigations into the coronavirus pandemic, repeating his allegation that federal officials participated in a "covid coverup" related to the possible origins of the virus.

The libertarian senator has long maintained that government leaders have not been forthcoming about U.S. ties to virus research conducted in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus outbreak was first detected in 2019.

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In combative congressional hearings, infectious-disease experts such as Anthony S. Fauci, the longtime National Institutes of Health official who retired from government service in 2022, have insisted to Paul and other Republicans that while NIH funded the virus research, the work could not have sparked the pandemic. Paul has rejected those explanations.

"NIH and HHS have refused to turn over the documents as to why Wuhan got this research money and why it wasn't screened as dangerous research," Paul said on Fox News last week. "I'm looking forward to getting those [documents], mainly because we need to try to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Paul has laid out other priorities for his coronavirus-related investigations, such as reviewing possible conflicts of interest among government scientists who recommended vaccines for the coronavirus and other diseases.

"I've been asking the question for a couple of years. If you are a scientist and you're on the committee that approves vaccines and recommends that they be mandatory, shouldn't you have to reveal if you get Pfizer royalties?" he told reporters Tuesday. The drug company Pfizer makes one of the leading coronavirus vaccines.

Paul's announcement was panned by public health experts who blasted his assertions about the pandemic's origin and criticism of coronavirus vaccines.

"He's demonstrated on numerous occasions that he doesn't follow the evidence and the known science," said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Ashish Jha, who led the nation's coronavirus response under President Joe Biden, said he agreed with Paul's desire to learn more about the origins of the pandemic - calling it a "very, very important" priority - but said he had not seen evidence of a coverup in the United States.

"I suspect that, ultimately, what we really need is more transparency from China," Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said in an interview Thursday. "And unless he has subpoena power over the Chinese government, I don't know that we're going to be able to make a lot more progress."

Jha and other experts also said Fauci has been unfairly targeted by Paul and other congressional Republicans.

Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, wrote in an email that he worried that Paul's investigations could "further tribalize and sensationalize what should be a sober scientific inquiry into the Chinese government's transparency," citing the "bombastic" questions posed to Fauci in congressional inquiries.

Paul had sought a Senate chairmanship in 2022, campaigning on promises to open new investigations into Fauci if he received subpoena power but was stymied when Democrats held the Senate.

The senator has repeatedly said Fauci should "go to prison" for allegedly lying to Congress, saying Fauci's private comments about the possible origins of the virus and the government's response have conflicted with what Fauci said in congressional testimony.

Fauci declined to comment.

Paul has worked with Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan), the current chairman of the government oversight panel, on bipartisan efforts to investigate whether the government is funding virus research that could pose a risk to Americans.

"The biggest item of the covid coverup is that for years, we've known there is this dangerous research," Paul told the New York Post in an published Thursday.

Paul's announcement came the same day that the House panel investigating the government's coronavirus response held its final hearing of this Congress.

The panel last month referred former New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo (D) to the Justice Department, saying he lied to Congress about aspects of New York's pandemic response - a potential template for what Paul and Senate Republicans could seek to do next year with government officials. Cuomo and his lawyers have said the allegations are baseless.

Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-California), the panel's top Democrat, said Republicans had pursued "vendettas" against scientists and public health officials rather than work constructively on investigating the pandemic and preparing for the next health crisis.

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