The Rand Paul interview (part 2 - PAYWALL DROPPED EARLY FOR FREE SUBCRIBERS)

The problems that Covid exposed don't end with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. Is there any way to stop ultra-risky research - civilian and military - to make viruses more dangerous?

SECOND OF TWO PARTS

On Thursday, I interviewed Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) at his Washington office. A longtime champion of civil liberties, Senator Paul once filibustered the Senate for over 10 hours to protest the Patriot Act and warrantless surveillance.

The interview’s first half, available here, focused on what Dr. Anthony S. Fauci knew or suspected about Covid’s origins. While Fauci has finally left the government, risky scientific research - both civilian and military/intelligence-funded - continues. In Part 2, Paul discusses the problems with its funding and oversight, and how we might do better.

I’ve edited the interview only for length, as well as very minor copy edits.

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(NOTE: I have decided to drop the paywall on this piece early and send the full article to free subscribers because of the public interest in Senator Paul’s comments - I still hope you will subscribe, though!)

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Part 1 ended with Paul saying:

I don’t think we should be manipulating — taking viruses from deep down in the cave out [and] manipulating them — to see if we can grow new viruses that are even more infectious to humans.

I just think that’s a bad idea.

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Berenson: That does seem like a bad idea, but let’s say that it in the next 12 months, this view that this did come out of, escaped from Wuhan lab becomes the consensus – I think it’s certainly moving that way… What we do going forward? We’re one country, the Chinese have plenty of labs, the Russians have labs, should there be an international treaty, how do we manage this or can we manage this?

Paul: We’re working on a bill that hopefully we’ll get a Democrat on… it’ll set up an independent commission that doesn’t dispense money or receive money, it’s not part of the grant system, it would be independent and above NIH [National Institutes of Health, which funds most basic medical research], but also all the intelligence agencies, everything.

And any research that’s going to be gain of function will have to go before this group. It’ll be scientists, they’ll be picked by the President. Nothing’s perfect, you can imagine it might not be perfect, but they won’t be linked to the money, so nobody in the committee will be somebody who receives money from NIH also…

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Berenson: No Kristian Andersen [a scientist who received a $9 million NIH grant after writing a paper downplaying the potential that the Covid virus had escaped from a lab] –

Paul (laughs): Yeah, it becomes a problem. And that’s the way a lot of funding in government is actually. The people who approve the funding are your colleagues in that specific area, so these are men and women you go to all these conferences with… and you’re like, “I’m probably gonna approve his, he’s a pretty good guy, I’ve had drinks with him, and I know he’ll approve mine.”

It’s a buddy system and it’s a bad system. Because they say, “Well, we can only have virologists who understand virology approve your grant.” I think it’s a mistake, I’d like to get more people who have a general science knowledge…

If it’s successful, if we can get it passed, I hope that will be the model that then we go to the Biological Weapons Convention, which I think is somewhat moribund… we want to try to get our definition [of gain-of-function research] into there and get them to participate. Now things like are imperfect, because if you’re a dishonest government you can do anything you want…

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(Rand Paul: he’ll fight for your right to party! Or not, it’s your choice, that’s the whole point.)

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Berenson:  At least you’ve set a standard.

Paul: Right. But we need to get to that, because Wuhan wasn’t, this wasn’t a one-off. We have dozens of labs in the United States who do gain of function research, we don’t think there’s significant oversight about that.

We think we’re also scratching the surface that there’s significant classified gain of function research, and this is the real rub… [Even as a senator] I have no knowledge of any of the classified research, it’s not like I could reveal a secret to you, I know nothing about it and it’s not for lack of asking.

And so our intelligence agencies have too much independence, they’re doing too much stuff without any kind of supervision, and if I don’t have any supervision how can I tell the public about it, how can there be any kind of sunlight to restrain what they’re doing. Their argument might be this, and I don’t know this is happening, let’s say their argument is, “The Chinese are weaponizing Ebola, they’re going to make it aerosolized and so they’ll kill the whole world, well we should probably aerosolize it first — ”

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Berenson: So we can come up with a vaccine –

Paul: And figure out a way to combat that. And the logic works, except for the fact that what if while you’re developing a cure for Ebola it leaks out?

In fact that’s what most people think happened in Wuhan, they think they were trying to develop a better coronavirus vaccine for the next pandemic, we’ve had smaller epidemics and stuff and if it comes again, we’re going to have a cure, and we think it leaked out of a lab, I don’t think they did it on purpose…

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Berenson: So you mentioned the intelligence agencies having too much power, or operating too independently. Didn’t we have this argument in 1976, and the Church Commission¹, is this all sort of post-9/11? Where did this come from?

Paul: The Church Commission was overdue and something absolutely that was necessary. Frank Church was a senator from Idaho, he was a Democrat, but what had happened in the sixties was our intelligence agencies were turned inward on ourselves.

Civil rights protestors, Vietnam War protestors were surveilled, Martin Luther King was illegally surveilled and their private lives were invaded at the behest of the government for political reasons. And the Church Commission comes along as a response to that and a lot of the reforms came forward and were intended to have more oversight of the intelligence community. But just as an interesting aside, we’ve been trying to get the classified version of the Church report, the Church Commission’s report, we can’t read it, we can’t get it.

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(I have a dream… that one day the federal government will respect the Bill of Rights!)

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Berenson: Even though it’s 50 years ago?

Paul: It’s 50 years ago, I’m in the Senate… my committee, it might be appropriate to my committee, so far I have not been given access to the Church Commission. There’s a public one, but we want to read the classified one, why not, let’s see if there’s a difference, and why is it classified 50 years later?

But really we need another Church Commission now, and you’re right – so things got better through the seventies, and then they gradually got worse, and then 9/11 happened and they got precipitously worse…

Once 9/11 happens, they’re like, “Oh, we’ve always wanted a little more control, we’ve always wanted to look at phones.” So they didn’t create this episode, but once they had that episode, they certainly used that episode to say, “Hey, we can look at everybody’s phone calls, now we can collect their metadata.”

Some of the things that Edward Snowden revealed [about National Security Agency surveillance programs] were overreactions to 9/11. There is always the worry that in times of war, in times of emergency, in times of crisis, civil liberties go by the wayside, that people do trade their liberty for security, and it’s very hard to snatch it back afterwards.

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Berenson: Well, we certainly saw that in 2020 and 2021. But is it weird for you as a Republican? You mentioned Frank Church - it seems that the Democratic Party is no longer the party of civil liberties.

Paul: [Democrats] seemed to think that there’s a health exception or an emergency exception to the Bill of Rights, and they just didn’t seem to care too much. Also I think… they so thoroughly hate Trump, they think, Gosh, if he’s for it I’m against it…

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Berenson: So a lot of this is just driven by animosity toward Trump, or at least some of it?

Paul: Some of it is. And then some of the people I think, also, they just seem to think there are exceptions. People think there are exceptions to the First Amendment, they think there are exceptions to Bill of Rights… There were some good court cases by the Supreme Court where they ruled and said specifically there is no emergency exception to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, and you know, this is an ongoing battle.

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Berenson: Last question for you, very quickly. We’re seeing a right wing populism, I would say, a muscular government. You’re a conservative but you’re libertarian. Do you feel that you fit into that world?

Paul: We worry about that. And it is on the rise. And some of it’s inspired by Trump. And some of it’s inspired by protectionism, people are big on protectionism, and some of it’s inspired by people who I think have an irrational fear or hatred of China, and I am concerned about it, and I try to fight it every day, because I think we’re actually less likely to fight with China if we have Chinese companies doing business in our country.

Berenson: Thank you, Senator.

1. Technically, the Church Committee, a Senate Select Committee that started in 1975.