What Else Are They Hiding?

Commentary

This past week was a wild ride. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released many thousands of pages of documentation concerning the strange world of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) while Dr. Anthony Fauci was at the height of his power as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci’s wife headed the ethics department for the entire agency.

His tenure there came to an end in December 2022, following three years in which he was celebrated by mass media as the nation’s leading voice for science and the man with all the answers for dealing with a respiratory pandemic. He was on television daily, sitting for as many as 12 interviews a day.

All this while, he kept careful logs of each day, while working with a large staff to prepare the document as the first draft of an autobiography. He believed that he would go down in history with exactly the reputation the media had cultivated for him. He lobbied for and amassed dozens of awards, some of which paid in the high six figures. He was sought after and doted on by all the elites.

All at once, it has fallen apart. The simple reason: The agency he once occupied is now run by a man and people he had ferociously denounced in public and private. The release was an act not of revenge but of simple transparency. The American people deserve to know the truth about a time in which accurate information was denied to them through censorship and media propaganda.

It’s a rare treat. We find out, for example, that the billionaire Bill Gates has special security clearances at NIH, where at every visit he was treated like royalty. Gates cleared his book on pandemics with Fauci, who recommended an editor at NIH, none other than Dr. David Morens, who has been charged with document destruction.

The revelations go on and on seemingly without limit. I started reading as soon as the diary was released. I saw that it was 1,100 pages, but that’s full pages in small type. In book form, it would be 2,400 pages. I could not stop reading. Having lived and breathed every day of this, I was fascinated to see Fauci’s own thinking in light of the world outside.

Not only was my weekend gone completely, but also, without notice, the project took up the next day and evening and then again. And again. It was late Thursday afternoon before I finished. My notes on the salient parts, the truly astounding material, alone took up 30 pages along with screenshots. I had lost so much sleep over these days and canceled every appointment. It was all too delicious to resist.

And you know why, correct? For years we had been stuffed to the gills with the greatness myth. Then it suddenly all unraveled, slowly but furiously and all at once. The author was put in front of a Senate subcommittee and questioned in great detail about the origin of the virus, the contracts, the cover-ups, the angling for fame and fortune, and so much more.

At every question, the witness would only invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination. But this alone was strange because the witness had already gained a full pardon for any misdeeds dating back to 2014. He could have confessed all and then some and faced no prosecution. All he had to do was tell the truth.

He was vulnerable only to the charge of perjury, but even that he could not risk. So he remained silent throughout, invoking his Fifth Amendment right 111 times. I have watched many Senate hearings in my life. I had never seen one like this. The drama was intense. I was not there, but those who were said it was even more fiery in person.

There is really no way to sum up our current moment. In 2019, the economy was doing well and Trump was popular. There were the usual political divisions but no real emergency on the horizon. All at once in the first months of 2020, everything fell apart and a foreign regime was visited upon us, complete with new protocols that required staying home and standing apart from people and covering our faces. We could not go to church, visit the sick, or travel to other countries.

A year later came the promised relief that turned out not to hold up but instead caused more suffering. All the while, trust in the system we had never really questioned began to collapse. We were routinely instructed to trust this Dr. Fauci. Most of the dissidents, including my friends who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, were censored. Our accounts were threatened and removed. Many were debanked.

Our world collapsed completely, and all these years we’ve cried out for answers. We’ve received only bits and pieces, enough to cobble together workable theories.

Seemingly out of nowhere, we are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of revelations. We can only read with amazement at the inner workings of government, the chaos, the pettiness, the corruption, the confusion, the deception. It’s all here, and now we see that there was a strong basis for why trust had evaporated. It seems as if every conspiracy theory was coming true.

Consider too that we have all these documents only because Fauci left so much behind on government computers. We also have men and women of conscience in charge of releasing them. Millions of hours of painstaking work are behind these releases, all done in the service of truth.

It’s really not possible to feel any joy from what we read. There is only tragedy, not only in the life of one man but also in all those who followed him and the nation that suffered so much from living under his diktat. At the very least, we are entitled to hear answers from him, point by point, but instead we get silence.

The list of institutions that have been hit hard by this is long and includes large media, academia, the scientific establishment, the world of professional medicine, and government itself. We cannot help but wonder today what is real and what is fake, what can be trusted and what is too far gone ever to be trusted again. No one ever wanted to be where we are today at the 250th anniversary of the country, to see how the dreams and ideals of our Founders have been so trounced and disrespected by so many in power. And yet that is where we are.

There is some deeply profound poetry about this moment. As sad as all of this is, and as much as it pains us today to think of all who have suffered, we should feel gratitude mainly for the truth to which we suddenly have access. For me, reading all these releases has been something of a catharsis. I hope you too will read and not merely trust media summaries or artificial intelligence reductions. It needs to be read in full to get the whole picture.

Nor can we shelve that great, great question: What else is being hidden from us, and for how long? Trust cannot return until we know the full truth. I suspect that this will take many years, and that’s fine. We can be patient.

Let there be no despair in the land today. These files have been released by men and women of enormous courage and conviction. They have taken huge risks to stand up for what is right. They have given us all a gift, the evidence that our instincts that something was not right were on target. They are evidence that redemption is not only possible; it is happening.

In those dark days of 2020 when the world seemed to be collapsing, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University would call me with a grave sense of moral urgency. “What can we do to stop the madness?” he would ask. He did what he could then. Now he finds himself as the head of the National Institutes of Health, working to begin the process of rebuilding. We have a very long way to go, but the essential first steps are done. We are going to get what we seek: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.