Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on Monday previewed the upcoming hearing with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci regarding the origins of COVID-19.
Although reports have surfaced that Fauci’s National Institutes of Health division funded gain of function research in Wuhan, China, and other cruel experiments, Paul told Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo he doesn’t “think Fauci is ever going to admit it.”
“Even the NIH admitted this week that basically they did merge viruses, and they became more dangerous,” Paul stated. “That’s gain of function. They gained lethality. I don’t think Fauci is ever going to admit it. You have seen Merrick Garland performing live; I don’t think he’s ever going to prosecute him. But this is a big, big question. If this came out of the lab in Wuhan, what if a worse virus comes out of a lab?”
He added, “There’s a professor at MIT, Kevin Esvelt, who’s not a partisan, who wrote in The Washington Post recently, not a conservative journal, but he wrote that this type of research could threaten civilization. And there hasn’t been one hearing. I have been asking Democrats to have a hearing on gain of function research so this doesn’t happen again. We do this research in the United States. This is a big, big question. This disease we’re facing has a 1% mortality. What if we got a contagion that leaks from the lab that has a 50% mortality? They’re actually doing experiments as we speak with viruses that have 50% mortality. That shouldn’t be happening.”
Paul lamented that “we’re still funding the lab in Wuhan” and that Fauci “continues to lie” about gain of function research leading to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I introduced an amendment a month-and-a-half ago, and it passed unanimously, to stop all funding to the Wuhan lab. But it has not been signed by President Biden yet and has not gone through the House. So, yes, this is a big problem. Money still flows to Wuhan,” he outlined.
“But, even worse, here’s the judgment of Dr. Fauci. He continues to say, when asked, should we be funding this research? He says, yes, that’s where the viruses are, we should be funding research in China,” Paul continued. “But he fails to address the question of whether or not the Chinese Communist Party, the generals in the lab, the military’s involvement in the lab, whether they’re to be trusted, and he fails to acknowledge that this could have come from the lab, and he continues to lie about the idea of whether gain of function research was going on.”
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