Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) held a Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday featuring a CIA whistleblower who testified under oath that Dr. Anthony Fauci was involved in the COVID-19 cover-up.
“For years, Dr. Fauci was not merely a public health official speaking from the NIH,” Paul said in his opening statement. “He had a long-standing relationship with the National Security and Intelligence apparatus on biological threats, dangerous pathogens, classified life sciences research, pandemic preparedness, and COVID origins.”
“But how can Anthony Fauci objectively comment on a discussion of COVID origins when he approved the very funding that may have caused the pandemic virus?” Paul added. “From the outset of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci shaped the conclusions. Dozens of times, he referred to the idea that the pandemic originating in the lab was a conspiracy.”
Whistleblower James Erdman III told the committee that he led the National Intelligence Director’s Initiatives Group, known as the DIG, from March 2025 through April 2026, where he was “responsible for leading the DIG’s investigation into COVID origins, anomalous health incidents, and unidentified anomalous phenomena.”
He explained intelligence community leaders and analysts “downplayed the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated as a result of a lab incident.”
“Intentional or not, the IC’s [intelligence community’s] actions resulted in a cover-up, wasted resources, and a failure to properly inform policymakers,” Erdman added, and went on to assert that “public health policy would have been very different had the American public been made aware that a virus from a lab in China was going to serve as the foundation for an emergency use authorization mRNA products being mandated by the former administration.”
“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” he declared. “Dr. Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists.” Those involved with Fauci’s cover-up include “public health experts who have been in his orbit for the last twenty-plus years.”
Scientists with the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG) influenced “national laboratory WMD research, policy decisions, finished analysis, and other intelligence matters, creating misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest, as well as counterintelligence issues,” he noted, adding that it “received funding from NIAID And other agencies for vaccine research, USAID’s PREDICT project, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. It even worked with Chinese scientists on coronavirus and other pathogen studies pursuing vaccines.”
