Image by Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times via Getty / Futurism
Kristi Noem, the gun-loving former South Dakota governor who now runs Homeland Security, was rushed to the hospital this week for a severe allergic reaction — and she just so happened to have visited a biohazard lab run by our nation’s top allergy specialists the day prior.
On June 16, per a photo posted on X by Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Noem visited the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the bulk of the United States’ biodefense experiments — including its research into COVID-19 and Ebola — are conducted.
The HomeSec head was seen standing alongside RFK Jr. and his fellow political nepo baby, GOP senator Rand Paul, as they posed awkwardly in front of the NIAID sign. Though we don’t know exactly what the trio was doing there, we could hazard some guesses given the shared COVID skepticism and general anti-scientific sentiments between them.
In photos published by the Department of Homeland Security on its official website, Noem and her comrades were seen not only shaking hands with fatigue-wearing military leaders at Fort Detrick, but also watching lab workers do important-looking experiments.
Though Noem infamously opposed masking during the early days of the pandemic, she has not, to her credit, ever proposed any conspiracy theories about the origins of the novel coronavirus. The same can’t be said of Paul, who has been long been outspoken in his insistence that the virus escaped from a high-security lab in Wuhan, China.
So dedicated is the Kentucky Republican to the “lab leak” theory that he declared last November that he would be starting an investigation into its origins. Soon after Noem became Homeland Security secretary under president Donald Trump’s second administration, Paul got her department’s help in subpoenaing federal agencies about said theory.
RFK Jr., meanwhile, has a way more old school reason to visit the biohazard lab. He has for years stridently argued that Lyme disease was an escaped bioweapon cooked up by the US military that escaped from a lab similar to NIAID’s at Fort Detrick.
Because there’s not much information about what went on during the trio’s so-called “inspection” aside from the photo ops, it’s anyone’s guess what Noem, Paul, and Kennedy encountered inside that lab, or if it had anything to do with her hospitalization the subsequent day.
Still, it’s incredibly ironic that she was rushed to the hospital with an allergic reaction right after visiting a facility run by an agency dedicated to studying such health issues — the same one that RFK Jr. has already attacked during his tenure at the helm of our nation’s healthcare.
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