Dr Anthony Fauci Took Refuge Under the Fifth Amendment 111 Times
WSJ: “Senator Rand Paul deserves credit for digging into the truth about the destructive Covid response and the effort by Dr Fauci to stifle dissent and hide the record.”
August 5, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
The above excerpt from The Wall Street Journal is from a July 30, 2026 lead editorial, “Dr. Fauci Takes the Fifth, Alas.”
On May 6, 2020, I published a post at Beyond These Stone Walls entitled, “The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19.” I became interested in the subject matter because for the previous month I had been gravely ill in prison and self-isolated in an effort to halt the spread of a virus that had devastated my immune response. There was no treatment whatsoever beyond my resolve not to pass it on to others. My friend Pornchai Moontri was here with me then and he had Covid as well. So did most of the prisoners who shared the space in which we lived. I was in my later 60s then, and at one point I thought I may not survive it, but obviously I did.
What I wrote at the time about evidence for a source connection for the virus with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China was widely dismissed in the U.S. as a conspiracy theory, but it was dismissed mostly for political reasons rather than scientific ones. The Wuhan wildlife market connection curiously proffered (and oddly preferred) by Democrats was also in lockstep with the level of surety professed by the Chinese Communist Government. The agreed-upon doctrine was that the virus was contracted and innocently spread by Chinese citizens, and/or tourists who purchased, and consumed wild animals at a Wuhan market. That assertion, without compelling scientific evidence, would have been widely dismissed by Democrats as racist if President Trump had asserted it.
Four months before I wrote the above-linked post — but unknown to me at the time — Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote in a January 2020 diary entry that the Wuhan market was not the source of the viral spread, but rather an “amplifier” of it.
In 2026, a video played by Homeland Security Committee Chair, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) showed Dr. Fauci stating with dogmatic certainty in TV interviews that wild animals being sold in Asian ‘wet markets’ were the “likely” source of the virus. More recently, Dr. Fauci and his team of lawyers tried to suppress the journal evidence as “personal views” but a court ordered that they may be made public. Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told Fox News that his staff “dug the diaries” out of Health Department servers and gave them to the Homeland Security Committee.
The Left of the U.S. Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party Are Becoming Dangerously Aligned
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has stated that there has been a cover-up of the true origin of Covid-19. If so, the cover-up has been the work of some of our highly partisan American news media as much as that of the Chinese Communist Party.
I survived, but the above-linked post I wrote did not fare quite as well. It addressed with much doubt the origin of Covid-19 that had been settled upon in the official account of the Chinese Communist Party. Since then, the World Health Organization (WHO) has conducted its own investigation with conclusions that conveniently matched those of China’s communist regime and the U.S. Democratic Party, all without evidence.
However, the cooperation of the Chinese government was sorely lacking, and some WHO investigators were not satisfied that the whole truth had been uncovered and told to the world. I am certainly no wild conspiracy theorist, but the science part of me had doubts about the reigning dogma: that a Wuhan wildlife market was the source of the virus despite evidence that the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology had been handling that same virus since its initial quiet discovery in an abandoned mine in Southwest China in 2012.
It was discovered then when six Chinese citizens entered a mine in Yunnan Province to gather samples of bat droppings. All six became quite ill within days. Three of them died. Now new evidence has emerged from a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that in November 2019, a month before the world even heard of Covid-19, three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers became critically ill and were hospitalized. The Biden administration, which had earlier shut down any inquiry into a possible laboratory source for the virus, had then and only reluctanly called for further review. There is a lot more to this story.
I have written that there was zero evidence to support the conspiracy theory that this is a weaponized virus intentionally unleashed on the world. Emails released at the time by Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed that he was warned in early 2020 by immunology expert Kristian Andersen that “the virus had some unusual features hinting at manipulation in a lab setting.” Dr. Andersen stated that the virus was not compatible with evolutionary theory leading him to believe that it was manipulated in a lab. Four other experts in his team agreed with that assessment. Then suddenly it was withdrawn without explanation. From 2014 to 2019 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sent $3.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology culminating with a note of thanks for sticking by the “natural origin" theory.
Evidence that something is amiss here continued to mount. In following weeks, Kristian Andersen deleted thousands of tweets with information related to his initial assessment of the virus. In early June of that year Dr. Andersen deleted his Twitter account and has since reportedly declined to respond to questions, as we have recently seen, so has Dr. Fauci himself.
According to a June 4, 2021 Wall Street Journal report, the NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, “and it is likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted gain-of-function research to make them more deadly or infectious.” In a February 2020 email, Dr. Fauci sent his deputy a paper about this gain-of-function research. The email instructed the deputy, “Read this paper. You will have tasks today that must be done.” His deputy replied that he would “try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.” Dr. Fauci has said to date that his organization did not fund gain-of-function research, but “I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab.”
Dr. Steven Quay and physics professor Richard Muller published their findings in The Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2021) revealing that the gene sequence of a virus that has been subjected to gain-of-function adaptations is not typically naturally occurring. And yet it does appear in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. “The scientific evidence,” they say, “points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.” If true, the world is left to determine whether the leak was indeed an accident.
There have always been many reasons to question China’s official explanation — for which there is also zero evidence — that humans visiting a Wuhan market contracted the virus from an animal that had been bitten by a bat, and then it spread from Wuhan across the globe. Again, the science part of me concludes that there would be many other examples of a similar natural transmission of deadly viruses if this scenario were so. Given the stakes for humanity and for the future, the truth must be uncovered. However, in both China and the United States this inquiry has been suppressed for political bias having nothing to do with scientific truth.
After I and others wrote about the origin of Covid-19 in 2020, the concept of a possible laboratory leak as the source of the virus was widely and quickly dismissed. A New York Times reporter admitted that the Times dismissed the theory only because it was the Trump administration that first raised it. CNN dismissed it as an unhelpful conspiracy theory in 2020, but now reluctantly calls for further investigation. Also early in 2020, 27 leading scientists signed an open letter condemning conspiracy theories that suggest Covid-19 did not have a natural origin like the one officially proffered by the Chinese government. Now several of the signatories have withdrawn that position. That fiasco was on a par with the 51 intelligence operatives in the United States who lent their names to a document denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian disinformation.”
The People’s Republic but Not the People’s Pandemic
In early January 2020, international news media began reporting on a viral outbreak of unknown origin in Wuhan, China. On January 30, 2020, Senator Tom Cotton warned that “Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) immediately dismissed this suspicion of a laboratory involvement as “absolutely crazy.”
Much of the mainstream U.S. news media immediately took up representation of the CCP denouncement, not because Senator Cotton’s idea was not worthy of scientific inquiry, but because of an unspoken media mandate to disparage the people who proposed it: Senator Tom Cotton and President Donald Trump. The Washington Post declared, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was absolutely debunked.” The New York Times followed with the headline, “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origin.”
We should never again have a global pandemic during a U.S. presidential election year. The July 30 lead editorial cited above, “Dr. Fauci Takes the Fifth, Alas,” concludes, “The conformist media idolatry of Dr. Fauci was a way of shutting off debate over Covid policy. It also became a way for the press to attack President Trump in an election year.” From that point on, anyone who published any evidence for why the possibility of a laboratory connection should be considered was labeled on CNN and MSNBC and most major news networks as “fringe” or “a conspiracy theorist.” I was hit with those same labels after my May 2020 post linked above.
On February 6, 2020, Botao Xiao, a molecular biologist and researcher at South China University of Technology, published a paper in which he concluded that the novel coronavirus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” Under pressure from the CCP, he quickly withdrew that publication.
A year later, a group of 18 scientists from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford universities signed an open letter in the journal Science calling for a more serious consideration of the theory that the virus could have been of natural origin that, after discovery in a cave, was brought back to a laboratory intentionally or by accident and then escaped.
Now the CCP has obstructed any further investigation. The mine in Yunnan Province set up a checkpoint that bars journalists and investigators from entering.
The body of evidence gathered by the World Health Organization investigation is not at all compelling and is not supported by emerging evidence. It is important to get to the bottom of this to prevent an outbreak like Covid-19, or something worse, from ever occurring again.
But what is most important here is a point I have made before and must make again: The Chinese Communist Party and government are not a reflection of the will, minds, or hearts of the Chinese people. Anti-Asian bigotry was not an acceptable response to the pandemic. The good people of China exist under an oppressive Communist regime. China is called the People’s Republic, but Covid-19 was not the people’s pandemic.
On that note, and perhaps only loosely related, everything written in this post should raise the inner alarm of every thinking person about the newest, most dangerous development in our politics: the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America. What sane, thinking person would ever want to go down that road again? We need our news media and we need it to be free of Socialist control.
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Note to readers from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these posts of related interest:
America Turns 250, but This Is Not the Twilight’s Last Gleaming
The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19
From Dorothy Rabinowitz: ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’
The marriage of media and left-leaning politics has brought us Pandemonium.