CLAY: We are going to be joined by the man in the middle of a congressional debate that is of incredibly high significance: Where did covid come from, and how much might the United States (including Dr. Fauci himself) have helped to engineer this virus via gain-of-function research if, in fact, it all came from that research?

Which we still do not know.

By the way, of course, these were comments that I just opened the show with, that if you even suggested on social media in recent history, Buck, you were not allowed to have that conversation. And this all is tied into one of the biggest stories maybe in American history, if it’s determined that Dr. Fauci has been lying about the United States’ role in helping to support gain-of-function research on coronaviruses that led to an outbreak that has devastated — in many parts of the globe — the economic and life of many.

This is… I know sometimes in the media people will exaggerate for effect and say, “Oh, this is a really big story,” but this is a pretty monumentally massive story, Buck Sexton, and we are going to discuss this in great detail.

BUCK: I mean, a big part of it is, if there was even an effort — and let’s just say that we will cede some degree of good faith to the other side that I don’t think it deserves, meaning the Fauci-ites and the international health bureaucracy consensus that clearly was coordinating in the beginning and deciding what the official narrative would be, even if we would concede, “You know what?

“They really did think that this probably came from the wet market and not from the lab,” the fact that they would then, as scientists, be a part of a suppression campaign of what was clearly a possible theory and therefore one that should be disproven, right? The hypothesis should have been tested, not discarded.

That brings up a whole lot of other questions about why do we continue to live in a society — at least I could speak here in America, and it’s true in a lot of other places around the world — where we hold up Fauci and those like him as though they haven’t been wrong.

As though they haven’t been dishonest, as though they are heroes that we should all follow blindly into massive transformation of our society, abandoning key aspects, key points of our constitutional protections and of our day-to-day lives. These people, meaning the Fauci-ites, made it so you couldn’t go to church or synagogue or mosque or wherever for months!

CLAY: Or school or work.

BUCK: For months on end. But on the religious side of it, it’s a clear constitutional violation, and the fact of the matter is that judges were too cowardly to say, “Sorry, you don’t get to just make some determination about the big box store can be open to go buy a lawn mower,” this was true in California, “but your church is shut down ’cause that’s not important; the lawn mower store is important.”

CLAY: Or the protests are permissible all over the streets in the country, but you’re not allowed to go to church.

BUCK: That was a critical moment, Clay, because that was the breaking point for people who are willing to hear out… Look, in the beginning, I still say, two weeks was a valid plan. Everyone just lock it down for two weeks while we figure out what’s going on. I think that that’s a reasonable thing to do based on what we were seeing then. But it was two weeks. It wasn’t six months.

It wasn’t 18 months. And it wasn’t what we’re seeing now, which is a transfer of the initial pitch into Forever Covid, which is what we’re facing, the Forever Fauci-ism. And I very much want to tell people that say “mask up,” this is what sane people, this is what smart people do — to “go Fauci” themselves. And Fauci is clearly, clearly personally offended by the notion that he may have been a part of the suppression of the lab leak theory in the beginning. This is why we had that fiery exchange with Rand Paul.

CLAY: And we’re setting the table, by the way, Buck, because Rand Paul is going to be with us live on the program in the third hour here to help us understand his arguments in a way that isn’t actually being shared — go figure — about many people in the media. But if you missed this, this is a portion (cut 3) of what happened yesterday in an explosive Senate hearing, Senator Rand Paul going after Dr. Fauci.

FAUCI: If the point that you are making is that the fah — the grant that was funded as a subaward from Eco Health to Wuhan created SARS-Cov-2 — that’s where you are getting… Let me finish!

PAUL: We don’t know.

FAUCI: Wait a minute!

PAUL: We don’t know that.

FAUCI: (sputtering)

PAUL: But all the evidence is pointing that it came from the lab —

FAUCI: You —

PAUL: — and there will be responsibility for those who funded the lab, including yourself.

FAUCI: It is molecularly impossible!

PAUL: No one’s saying those viruses caused it.

FAUCI: (sputtering)

PAUL: No one is alleging those viruses caused the pandemic. What we’re alleging is, the gain-of-function research was going on in that lap and NIH funded it.

FAUCI: That is not —

PAUL: You can’t get away from it. It meets your definition, and you are obfuscating the truth.

FAUCI: (sputters) I want everyone to understand that if you look at those viruses — and that’s judged by qualified virologists and evolutionary biologists — those viruses are molecularly impossible to result —

PAUL: No one’s saying they are!

FAUCI: — in SARS-Cov2.

PAUL: No one’s saying those viruses caused the pandemic!

FAUCI: And you are implying that what we did was responsible for the deaths of individual. (sic)

PAUL: It could have.

FAUCI: I totally resent that —

PAUL: And it could have been.

FAUCI: — and if anybody —

PAUL: It could have been.

FAUCI: — is lying here, Senator, it is you.

CLAY: This is my understanding. You tell me if you understand it differently, Buck, but I do think there’s a lot of people out there who don’t understand gain-of-function research. It’s basically biologically in a lab as opposed to naturally in the world creating a virus that is dangerous, with the idea being that in creating these dangerous viruses, we can help to better understand if they naturally emerge in the world and we have to respond to them. The idea with gain-of-function is that’s what we’re trying to, basically. Right.

BUCK: They tweak existing viruses.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And this is essential because —

CLAY: To make them more virulent.

BUCK: That’s right. They usually make it more transmissible, and in some cases maybe even more dangerous to humans. And this is why the actual amino acid chains that are present covid-19 are central to the debate over whether this came from a lab or not. Because there are some telltale signs, some fingerprints that you can see (so to speak) through gain-of-function research.

And it seems — some scientists are already saying — that those are present with covid-19. But I also think, Clay, there’s a broader issue that has to be addressed in the background of the whole gain-of-function/Fauci debacle here, and that is consensus is not science. And this idea that you get a bunch of people together who say, “We think the following; therefore, everyone else needs to shut up and do what we say”?

This should not exist in a free society, and if you actually go — and it’s fascinating to do so. If you go and look at the history of modern medicine, at various points you will see the most elite scientific communities in the world were flat-out wrong as wrong can possibly be. I mean, in the Victorian period in England, they believed that you would get cholera from miasma. They called it the Miasmatic Theory.

CLAY: There’s a great book, by the way, about how they determined where cholera came from. Steven Johnson wrote a great book.

BUCK: It was Dr. John Snow —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — who’s going around saying, “Guys, I really think it’s from the water, and let me show you the data.” And the Faucis of that time, the Faucis of that mid-nineteenth century, mid-/late nineteenth century period were saying that’s crazy, we know it’s in the miasma. They had absolutely no idea.

Dr. Joseph Lister is, a Scotsman, was trying to present to everybody, “If only we would clean surgically instruments, we would prevent infection.” Believe it or not, at that period of time — and this actually, unfortunately, related to James Garfield after he was shot in the back and they had the doctors trying to treat him. Those doctors refused Lister’s idea of, “Clean the instruments; do antisepsis,” which is what it was called.

Doctors at that — and when I say “doctors,” I mean the London College of Medicine.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: The top in the world were absolutely convinced that it was actually a mark of how good a doctor you were to have filthy garments that had all the blood and splatter and everything. It was like a badge of honor. I mean, the absolute — from a bacteriological and epidemiological perspective — worst thing you could do.

I mean, Clay, we could go on and on. I’ve done whole studies and gone on long rants before about cholera outbreaks here in New York City. The biggest bank in the world, J. P. Morgan, was founded essentially as a charter in New York going back to the time of Hamilton and Jefferson. It was founded so they could have clean water in New York City.

That’s where it became Chemical Bank and then it was acquired by JPMorgan because they were trying to figure out what do you do with cholera. But even then there was pushback. My point here, Clay — and I know you and I see this the same way — is consensus does not determine the truth. Consensus is just group opinion. And if we keep getting battered into submission by people with lab coats who have authoritarian and clearly left-wing sympathies, we’re gonna get dragged through more misery than we already have on this.

CLAY: “Science is messy” is an easy way to sum that up, and messy arguments in science are decided by debate over time. So with a new virus, arguably the worst thing you could do in terms of trying to determine the best responses is to insist on whatever “the experts,” in quotation marks, agree on right now. Because challenging conventional wisdom, Buck, as you well know, is hard to do. And it requires a long time to convince people who are highly trained and highly skilled that their conventional wisdom may well be wrong.