Review of: Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up

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Phil Duffy
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Ever wonder if you were living in the Dystopian States of America? Senator Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, published October 10, 2023, does not disarm those haunting feelings.

This book is not for those who wish to place everything we have learned during the covid-19 control program in a memory hole. To the contrary, Paul is encouraging those who would pursue the truth to join him in confronting the difficult questions this period raises, including the origin of the covid-19 organism: did it arise naturally and spill over from an animal into the human species, or did it emerge as an accident from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). He further asks what our government has done to conceal its possible funding of the WIV “gain-of-function” research that was being done there. He explores the tangential issues of the nature of the organism’s transmission and the efficacy of such measures as masking, social distancing, and the selective shutting down of the United States economy and the nation’s educational systems.

Is all of this significant? Certainly, if we accept that a million Americans lost their lives to covid-19, along with five million worldwide.

Senator Paul’s opening salvo is aimed at how the covid-19 organism arose, making a serious case for its having escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s laboratory where Dr. Shi Zhengli had gained an international reputation as the “bat scientist.” Because the book is primarily chronologically oriented, describing Senator Paul’s efforts to get at the truth about the covid-19 pandemic, the reader does not at first learn who the first three victims of covid-19 were. Toward the end of the book, however, we learn their identities. All worked in the WIV, and one, Ben Hu, was a “gain-of-function” researcher and a colleague of Dr. Shi Zhengli.

Was the federal government somehow involved in funding this dangerous gain-of function research? If so, was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, somehow involved? The book is full of formal interchanges between Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci. If it served no other purpose, reading these exchanges makes Deception an excellent intellectual investment. The reader should be able to determine who is telling the truth.

Likewise, Deception shines a light on the reaction of the mainstream media to those raising questions about the covid-19 control program. How many people have already forgotten the incessant drumming of the party-line message originating in the government—that the virus had jumped from animals in the Wuhan “wet market” to the human population but that Operation Warp Speed would protect Americans by cutting through the bureaucracy and unnecessary prehuman testing to give them a safe and 95 percent effective vaccine against this new pathogen? Also, what did 95 percent effectiveness mean if not that getting the shots would immunize us and prevent transmission in ways that herd immunity could never achieve without a devastating increase in deaths and hospitalizations?

Deception reminds us that there were attendant social actions, either voluntary or coerced, that were promoted as necessary to slow the transmission of the disease. Masking was one of those measures, something visible that separated those socially responsible from those who would recklessly expose their fellow humans to such dangerous pathogens. If one cloth mask was not totally effective, perhaps two would finally trap those nasty viruses. To be really safe, sanitize every surface touched by those disease-transmitting humans with Clorox.

Never mind that the medical profession already knew that surgical masks were ineffective as barriers against the transmission of viral aerosols. Deception reminds us of the basic math that was being ignored, that the pore size of those masks was six hundred times the size of a covid-19 virus organism. Picture taking a handful of dried peas, throwing them against a chain-link fence, and then counting the number that make it through. Deception identifies masking as nothing more than theater.

Deception also reminds us of the lockdowns that were implemented by governments, including our own but excluding Sweden, which chose to keep its economy and schools open with apparently no ill effect. The book emphasizes the critical loss of education and how forced homeschooling differentially affected families. Those that had an adult at home to monitor the homeschooling survived, but what about the many households where this resource did not exist? Were these families that could afford to fall further behind in education?

The lockdown mentality seemed to bring the authoritarians out of the woodwork, but the most damaging of these authoritarians were the state governors wishing to build an image of being tough on disease. Senator Paul notes that these were primarily Democratic governors, but elsewhere, he finds fault with Republicans who were part of the hysteria. He specifically notes how President Donald Trump—who unleashed Operation Warp Speed, which led to the destruction of supply lines—promoted “stimulating” the economy by sending out substantial checks to virtually everybody. Of course, the federal government had no real wealth to disperse so the ongoing effect was inflation and a significant increase in the federal government’s debt.

Deception is not easy reading. There are parts where the average reader will need to work through medical terminology such as furin cleavage sites. This should not deter the typical reader from getting a sense for these concepts and how they fit into the bigger picture. It is the flow of medical logic that matters.

While Deception may be the most comprehensive view of what might be called the covid-19 control program, it is missing the piece about the Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Code arose out of the post–World War II decision to convict the Nazi doctors who were guilty of unethical human experimentation. Seven of these individuals were executed for “crimes against humanity.” A thorough comparison of that code with what might be called the covid-19 control program should reveal that all ten items in the code have been violated under the latter control program. That Deception does not address this important piece in understanding the covid-19 years is no criticism of Senator Paul, who has covered so many of the relevant questions from a critical scientific and political perspective.

Although government officials have announced that the covid-19 pandemic emergency is over as of May 11, 2023, we are still living with the aftermath of the pandemic late into 2023. During the emergency period, we have seen the degree of authoritarianism, disinformation, and hysteria that was unleashed for this one pathogen alone. In an essay from the Institute of Medicine Forum on Microbial Threats, Mark Woolhouse and Eleanor Gaunt of the University of Edinburgh warn that “ongoing global ecological change will continue to produce novel infectious diseases at or near the current rate of three per year.”

Do the math. If we accept that the government can declare medical emergencies at will, then we acknowledge that the government is empowered to eliminate our liberties at any time. This is a power even greater than that enjoyed by Adolf Hitler as he rose to become the absolute dictator of Nazi Germany in 1933. If we accept this, we fail to remember the lessons of history.

That, I believe, is Senator Rand Paul’s contribution to liberty. He won’t allow us to forget.