Call it an outrage, for it is all of that. Call it scandal: It is a scandal, certainly. And call it a tragedy — that and more.

What other verbiage can describe a laboratory emission, a leak, that’s now estimated to have killed at least six million human beings on this earth, and possibly shortened the lives of between sixteen and twenty-eight million — comparable to slaying the entire population of Colorado and causing premature deaths to everyone in the state of Florida?

That’s what occurred worldwide (1.2 million in the U.S.), although neither public officials, private health entrepreneurs, nor the scientific community have owned up to it, as yet.

One day, they will. Perhaps they will after a new book by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

We are speaking, obviously, of SARS-CoV-3, better known simply as covid or coronavirus: Its emergence, around late 2019 and early 2020, and what seems like a cover-up, may indeed be the greatest scandal in modern times, for this was not the happenstance of nature, a nefarious trick of evolution, but, it appears, a scientific mishap of unprecedented proportion, at least according to Paul and certain others.

Start with proximity. There are a number of laboratories in Wuhan, China, that handle or have handled coronaviruses, specifically SARS-CoV-2. These laboratories have connections both to the Chinese military and (incredibly enough) the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which funded some of the Wuhan laboratory research (through its Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases).

Wuhan, as the world knows too well, was also the epicenter for the covid pandemic.

Everyone blamed it on a wet market there, where animals and seafood are sold. It seemed like a good explanation.

The problem: as Senator Paul’s book points out, Chinese officials tested more than eighty thousand animals from the area — 209 unique species — and found the coronavirus in none of them. The closest one could find was in Laos, and it was not a perfect match.

No humans from the market area showed antibodies to the virus, as would be expected if there had been exposure there. Nor were bats or pangolins — animals that can harbor similar viruses — found for sale.

Meanwhile, the nearest bat cave known to have such viruses is about a thousand miles away.

Bats were and are to be found, however, at the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, where pathogens from the animals were tested and meddled with. If anything, the market was a “super-spreader” place, but not the actual place of origin. The virus’s arrival there was inexplicably sudden, indicating a person, not an animal, had carried it to the market.

Already it was known that there had been cases in which those bats had bitten workers or otherwise had exposed clinicians to the virulent, previously unknown virus. In fact, in 2019, three scientists there had become sick from it. In September of that year — months before the pandemic suddenly erupted at the nearby market — the key researcher working with this type of virus, Dr. Shi Zhengli (known as the “bat scientist”) suspiciously “destroyed the online coronavirus database she had compiled over the years, much of it financed by the U.S. taxpayer,” notes a summary of Senate hearings conducted by Senator Paul.

According to his book, The Deception,”News that three of her colleagues were seriously ill with a pneumonia of unknown origin sent shock waves throughout the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shi had to act quickly to survive.”

So would her colleagues and — as Senator Rand would have it — her fund-raisers, scientific mentors, and co-conspirators in the U.S., including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had approved major funding for her laboratory and was now scrambling, along with the Chinese, to ward off the historic pandemic that by most measures sprang from it.

One scientist who dared raise early alarm, Li Wenliang, died from covid at the age of thirty-three as he cared for some of the first victims.

Some wondered if it was really covid that killed Wenliang. For scientists who knew too much or said too much soon began vanishing from the scene.

Officials there and in the U.S., as well as other nations and the World Health Organization, continued to insist that the virus came from nature. When Dr. Robert R. Redfield — a virologist and head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — saw the make-up of the virus, including a suspicious portion of it that was not in any other kind of coronavirus, his first reaction was, “This isn’t natural.”

The reason for his suspicions: The structure of the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, showed strong indications that instead of evolving naturally, it had been “pre-adapted” for maximum transmissibility in humans — what is known as “gain of function” research. Translation: it appeared virtually certain that the coronavirus was engineered using what they call a “furin” enzyme cleavage site to boost precisely its speed of human-to-human transmission.

Like others, Dr. Redfield, who opposed such research, was immediately quieted, nudged aside by Dr. Fauci, who promoted gain-of-function research and by the end of January 2020 was working into early-morning hours not just trying to contain the pandemic but orchestrating the way covid’s origin would be presented to the public.

“Gain of function” work — ostensibly to see what might mankind in the future, but also used for military purposes — was temporarily banned by President Barack Obama in 2013, a pause that was breached a number of times by Dr. Fauci, who obtained exemptions for certain quiet work in this realm. It is outright sinister — enhancing the lethality of viruses — and as dangerous as nuclear weaponry.

In short, the gain-of-function purpose is usually to make a virus as dangerous as possible so science can learn how to handle such a danger if it arises in nature and prepare vaccines for it.

That is the more benign rationale.

But even this is playing dice with human lives.

The other reason gain of function is practiced is for military purposes.

Just a year before the Wuhan outbreak, Dr. Shi had applied for funding from the U.S. military precisely to perform such work on what became infamous as SARS-CoV-2.

The Chinese scientist, who had studied in the U.S., had close ties to a scientist at the University of North Carolina, Dr. Ralph Baric, who worked alongside both the government and a medical company in New York, EcoHealth Alliance, which funneled money to the laboratory.

One of the American health officials in charge of directing such funding was none other than Dr. Fauci — a man who seems to have had good but misdirected intentions and who proceeded to wield his considerable power obscuring the true origin or at least trying to convince himself that it didn’t come from a lab funded in part by his institute.

That research apparently allowed for the insertion of what they call a “nucleotide sequence” seen in humans, but not — hitherto — in bats.

To make matters yet more bizarre and distasteful is evidence that indicates that SARS-CoV-2 as we know was probably artificially “evolved” by passing it through the tissue of laboratory rats with “humanized” lungs (chimeras). In other words, its effects were enhanced by forcibly evolving it into more lethal forms.

The virus’s transmissibility was “99.5 percent optimized,” notes the senator’s report. That lethality — and artificiality — caused the call for urgent vaccination. The RNA sequence of the virus showed anomalies suggestive of laboratory manipulation.

When viruses are passed through animals in gain-of-function work (instead of gene-splicing) — as appears was the case here — it is tremendously difficult to detect human meddling with it. This is called the “no-see-um” technique, pioneered at places like the University of North Carolina, where the genetic sequence for covid’s furin cleavage site is identical to a microbiological “column” that has been extensively characterized there.

And what they call nucleotides had been neatly — perfectly — inserted in an odd place not found in other bats. Fauci’s own advisors were privately telling him the lab was the likeliest source — an idea he refused to accept and continued to declaim from the pulpit of the White House press room.

Whatever one’s take on Senator Paul, he has been the only one to stand up to the scientific establishment on this issue, and while some of his arguments about other aspects of the pandemic may be wayward, on this issue he appears to have hit a bullseye.

“Furthermore, labs in Wuhan were already inserting furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses in 2015, and the evidence for a lab leak is withering and relentless,” says his scathing report. “The pandemic coincidentally started just steps away from the largest collection of coronaviruses in the world, suggesting that the virus was indeed a leak from one of the many experimental coronavirus labs in Wuhan.”

It has been reported that when the pandemic erupted, Dr. Shi spent sleepless nights worrying that her laboratory was to blame (eventually concluding that it was not — that it came from another lab there).

Or did it?

It’s hard to know anything for sure.

A leading expert in the field of infectious disease, Jeffrey Sachs, “believes that there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health and many members of the scientific community have been impeding this investigation and deflecting attention away from the hypothesis that risky U.S.-supported research may have led to millions of deaths.”

Add to that the loss of work, suicides, addictions, domestic violence, bankruptcies, general societal unrest, lassitude, and sometimes outright stupor that seems to have followed in the pandemic’s wake (and its ongoing threat).

One can even point to the trillions spent to fend off the virus and its effects on individuals and companies by the current and previous White House as helping to fuel rampant inflation.

It might be called a “chastisement” fashioned by man’s own hands.

“The discovery that Dr. Shi was seeking U.S. military research money to create a coronavirus with a furin cleavage site one year before the pandemic was the smoking gun that finally destroyed the so-called consensus that Tony Fauci created,” says the summary, which has just been released in book form, along with Senator Paul’s actual book, which, with all its jarring details, can be found here.

[more soon…]