Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED, via Flickr; Screenshot / YouTube, BBC News, Cropped by Resist the Mainstream

Senator Rand Paul says he intends to persist in his investigation into the origins of COVID-19, and that he plans to scrutinize Dr. Anthony Fauci's secret “off the books” trips to the CIA.

Paul revealed to The Daily Mail that Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), maintained a cordial relationship with the CIA.

“The CIA officially still says [COVID-19 is] probably from animals,” the senator said. “We also have stories, rumors and innuendo that Fauci was a frequent visitor off the books to the CIA.”

Paul highlighted to the outlet how the CIA's stance contrasts with conclusions from the Department of Energy and the FBI, both of which suggested that the pandemic probably originated from a leak at a lab in Wuhan, China.

He also mentioned that despite an initial assessment by the CIA supporting the lab leak theory, senior officials within the agency dismissed these findings.

“We have another whistleblower from the CIA that says that the scientific committee that was commissioned to look into the origins of the virus actually voted six to one that it came from the lab and that they were overruled by superiors at the CIA,” Paul told The Mail.

Paul characterized the agency's change in position and its clandestine discussions with Fauci as suspicious.

He also noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially maintains that the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a profound global impact, likely originated from bats.

The CDC's website currently states, “We do not know the exact source of the current outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), but we know that it originally came from an animal, likely a bat.”

Paul dismissed that response as “batty,” revealing on Tuesday that the CDC and 14 other agencies were aware of a proposal from the Wuhan lab in 2018, which aimed to create a novel coronavirus similar to the one responsible for COVID-19.

Paul suggests that Fauci almost certainly knew about the Chinese labs' intent to create a novel coronavirus, as NIAID was a partner on the proposal the DEFUSE Project sent to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that outlined how the Wuhan lab intended to “manipulate known viruses with spike proteins of novel viral strains.”

Paul said, “So in January and February of 2020, instead of Anthony Fauci piping up and saying 'Oh, wow, they briefed us on this. It looks like they ended up doing what they briefed us on' instead of saying that, he commissioned people to say the opposite.”

“It makes me think there's really something there that they're hiding,” he added. “The fact that 15 agencies knew about this when the virus structure came out in January 2020 should have [said] 'I can't believe that the virus looks like exactly what they were proposing to do in research in 2018.”

“Anybody that was associated with any funding that went to Wuhan is concerned that they'll get blamed basically for the pandemic,” he continued. “And so they're trying to obscure any connections they had with this.”