Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said on Wednesday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow that the same day’s Senate hearing on the federal government’s funding of gain-of-function research on viruses would be the first of its kind since the COVID-19 outbreak.
Paul previewed a hearing held by a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday described by C-SPAN as an examination of “federal investment into the gain of function research of viruses and diseases.”
Gain-of-function research, Paul said, involves manipulation of viruses to change their virulence and lethality.
“This will be the first hearing on gain-of-function research,” Paul stated. “This is the research that was going on in the lab where they take a virus that has known mortality, like one of the coronaviruses that has somewhere between 15 and 30 percent mortality, then they mix it with an s-protein from an unknown virus from a bat cave about 800 miles away, and they scratch their heads and they say, ‘Wow, I wonder if we mix it with these new viruses, if we can make it more infectious in humans.'”
He said gain-of-function research has involved the infection of “humanized mice” that “have human lung cells” with genetically modified viruses. Researchers discovered that they could “create viruses,” including “superviruses,” that are “more infectious than ones found in nature and still very deadly.”
Paul continued, “This is gain-of-function research. This is what Dr. Fauci has repeatedly said they didn’t fund, but we’re going to have three esteemed scientists today who, I think, will acknowledge that this is the kind of research that was going on over there, that it was gain-of-function, and it did meet the definition.”
In May 2021, Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), testified under oath to a Senate committee that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) never funded gain-of-function research at the virology institute in Wuhan, China.
Fauci stated, “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“Dr. Fauci lied,” Paul remarked. “Basically, there was gain-of-function research going on in the lab in Wuhan. … “Six and a half million people have died worldwide from this virus, and many of us think it came from the lab, but all of us that are honest know that this was type of research was going on, and it’s a possibility that it came from the lab.”
He continued, “This is the first hearing on the origins of the virus [and] the gain-of-function research we’ve had in two and a half years. It’s extraordinary. We will have hearings in Washington about whether or not your furniture causes cancer, whether or not plastic in your bottles causes cancer, but we have not yet had one hearing [on] origins of a virus that killed millions of people.”
Marlow asked about parents opting against provision of COVID-19 vaccines for their children.
“People are smarter than we gave them credit for,” Paul replied. “People think that an elite group of scientists need to dictate our behaviors, and they’re all smarter than we are, but parents are pretty smart. The statistics are out there.”
The CDC issued a report in April estimating that approximately 75 percent of children — specifically 76.8 percent aged 0-11 years and 74.2 percent between the ages of 12 and 17 — had immunity to COVID-19. The CDC’s data were composed of blood tests searching for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
Paul said, “It’s also widely known that the immunity that you get from having the disease is protective. It’s at least as good as the vaccines — probably longer lasting than the vaccine — and probably more potent than the vaccine.”
He shared that he had been “bugging the CDC” to “be honest with the parents and release the data” of mortality rates among children reinfected with COVID-19.
“They say, ‘Oh, we don’t have the data,'” Paul said of the CDC. “The reason they don’t have the data is because the number is zero. I think zero children have died from a reinfection of COVID after they’ve had it. If 80 percent of them have had it, why in the world would we be putting them in masks? Why in the world would we be mandating vaccines for kids who have already had it?”
A study published by the medical journal Lancet in March found no deaths among 2,343 reinfections of COVID-19 it examined among children.
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