Tuesday, during an appearance on FNC’s “Special Report,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) insisted if the question about COVID-19 having leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan was to be answered, it had to be determined if the Chinese government was engaging in gain-of-function research.
Paul’s comments came on the eve of a Senate hearing on the topic.
“Before we even get to whether the virus came from a lab, we have to explore, were they doing gain-of-function research?” he said. “Were they taking viruses, mixing them with unknown viruses, and creating more lethal viruses, or viruses that were more infectious or transmissible? I say without question they were doing this. Anthony Fauci says they weren’t. Tomorrow we will have the first gain-of-function hearing on Capitol Hill, the first exploration of this topic in two years. A million Americans died, and we have not had one single hearing. Tomorrow, we have the first hearing, and I will three scientists, very esteemed scientists, scientists with hundreds of papers, peer-reviewed papers, editors of journals — this is an elite group of scientists that will be there tomorrow — I’m going to ask them, was it gain-of-function research that was going on in Wuhan?”
“That doesn’t prove it came from a lab, but it proves that dangerous research was happening there and that it could have come from the lab,” Paul continued. “And my question is, even if we don’t know for certain, let’s say it’s 50/50, that’s still a big probability that it came from a lab. At that point, wouldn’t we want to make sure we’re controlling — we have restrictions on exporting nuclear technology? Should we have restrictions on exporting DNA technology to communist China? I think yes.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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