A recent Vanity Fair magazine report described heavy-handed tactics and what was claimed to be “a siege mentality” at the National Institutes of Health when evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom presented the draft of an unpublished scientific paper about the origins of the COVID-19 virus he had written to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci and two of his colleagues, evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen and virologist Robert Garry.
Bloom’s paper suggested the virus came from a lab, contradicting Fauci’s stated belief. The article described a contentious exchange among a group of scientists over a Zoom call.
Friday on FNC’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reacted to the Vanity Fair piece and described the behavior of the NIH-affiliated scientists as “more like when you see from a mafia don than from a government bureaucrat or scientist.”
“Well, this expose in Vanity Fair shows Dr. Fauci and his acolytes once again, trying to suppress and trying to block any scientists who disagree with them,” Paul said. “So there’s this Jesse Bloom, who’s an evolutionary virologist, who thinks that the structure of the virus indicates that it, in all likelihood, came from a lab. Out of courtesy, he asked for a meeting with Dr. Fauci. They come in. They tell him he shouldn’t publish his paper. They say that it’s a heated discussion. And then one of them says, Well, if you publish it, I can get it done. But I’ll edit it and take care of it. Let me see your paper, and I’ll take care of it.”
“I mean, it’s really alarming,” he continued. “And this is what I tried to bring out in the last committee hearing is, is that they will do anything. This is more like what you see from a mafia don than from a government bureaucrat or scientist. If you disagree with him, they come down on you hard, and they try to suppress anybody with a different opinion. It happened to three famous epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford. Now, this is a scientist as well, that they say, Let’s do everything we can to try to suppress his opinion.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor