One of the great things about our job at The Patriot Post is that we’re not here to generate clickbait or gin up outrage over everything. When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, that’s a good thing because that was six years ago, and it’s hard to stay mad that long or even just to keep caring.

Yet we are here to analyze the news, and sometimes the news is outrageous revelations about things that happened six years ago.

In January 2020, before federal, state, and local governments shut down much of our economy due to COVID, Republican Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton first made the connection between SARS-CoV-2 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology: “We know that just a few miles away from that food market [where the disease was first contracted] is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory, which researches human infectious diseases.”

Cotton was routinely smeared in the Leftmedia for spreading a “conspiracy theory” that had been “debunked.” Except that reporting was false and deliberately deceptive. Heck, even leftist comedian Jon Stewart knew that if an “outbreak of chocolaty goodness” broke out near the Hershey chocolate factory in Pennsylvania, you could likely guess the culprit.

Anthony “The Science” Fauci, on the other hand, kept insisting for years that COVID originated zoonotically at a wet market. His version painted the Chinese people as third-world rubes. Cotton’s version put the blame squarely where it belonged — on the Chinese Communist Party.

That’s why the wet market theory became orthodoxy.

Fast-forward back to this week, and a CIA whistleblower revealed that Fauci knew and goaded the CIA to cover up the origin of COVID. National Review reports:

James Erdman, a career CIA operations officer who spent much of the last year on joint assignment for the Director of National Intelligence Director Initiatives Group (DNI DIG), testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday, telling committee members Fauci “influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the [intelligence community] consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists.”

He further said the CIA and DNI analytic managers responsible for examining the origin of Covid “made decisions inconsistent with the conclusions of subject matter experts and analytical tradecraft, consistently favoring the theory of zoonosis or natural origin.”

And when the CIA conducted a Covid relook in 2022 and 2023, the CIA “retaliated against analysts supporting the lab-leak hypothesis,” Erdman says, particularly against those who refused to agree with “management’s middle of the night anonymous rewrite of the analysis, which changed the assessment to a non-call judgment.”

In short, Fauci’s role was to poison the well of experts consulted by the CIA, with friends, colleagues, and coauthors of that infamous scientific paper “debunking” the lab origin. As Erdman put it, “There was no oversight monitoring how this web of relationships influenced research policy and public health in any holistic way, for over 20 years.”

You might say that Fauci spread a virus of misinformation.

You also may recall that it wasn’t until Fauci had pulled the cord on that golden parachute that the CIA finally admitted the obvious in 2025. Meanwhile, a House committee essentially came to Erdman’s conclusion back in 2023.

No wonder zero Democrats showed up for the hearing with Erdman.

BOMBSHELL: Here is the entire opening statement from CIA whistleblower James Erdman lll. He testifies that Dr. Fauci’s role in the COVID cover-up was INTENTIONAL.

He stacked the intelligence community’s analysis with conflicted scientists funded by NIAID who pushed the natural… pic.twitter.com/S1ZP9FlZGl

— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) May 13, 2026

It’s also no wonder that Fauci perpetuated the fiction about the wet market (and masks, and social distancing, and the vaccines, and…) because Fauci and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) he ran funded the very gain-of-function research that likely yielded COVID in the first place.

Why does all this matter, anyway? Readers of The Patriot Post already know the truth, and besides, Joe Biden pardoned Fauci — not because Biden admitted that Fauci had done anything wrong, of course, but because Donald Trump might hold him accountable. “I really truly appreciate” the pardon, Fauci said at the time, but “I have committed no crime,” and “there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.”

Lying to Congress is a crime, and Fauci did that every time he sat in a hearing. That’s to say nothing of his virtual money laundering operation or bearing outsized responsibility for wrecking the U.S. economy, destroying children’s education, ruining people’s lives when they lost their jobs, and leaving us six years later still saddled with persistent inflation that began as a result of policies he pushed.

If we could point to a single individual and say, “That guy broke Americans’ trust in the government,” it would be Dr. Anthony Fauci.

As for the CIA, the agency blasted Erdman and Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, not for saying anything untrue, but for saying it out loud. “This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing,” huffed Liz Lyons, CIA Director of Public Affairs. “As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”

On a final note, don’t miss that this whole thing came out on the same day President Donald Trump landed in China for a summit with Xi Jinping. That was no coincidence. Quite the contrary, it was a shot across the CCP’s bow that we know all too well that COVID was Made in China.

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