Republican Senator, an ophthalmologist and member of the Senate Health Committee Rand Paul confronted with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical advisor to the president alleging that coronavirus gain of function research was funded by NIH during a testimony before a Senate on July 20, 2021. He also suggested that Fauci and the NIH could be partly responsible for the pandemic and the deaths of 4 million people worldwide.
Paul allege that Fauci helped fund research and lied to Congress while under oath about Gain of Function research, he added that it was a crime to lie to Congress, a felony that could lead up to five years in prison. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci was one of the lead members of President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Paul cited an academic paper published in Nature in 2015 (https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3985) that shows the lab was conducting illegal research to create “potential pandemic pathogens that exist only in the lab, not in nature,”. Earlier this paper did not reveal funding source but after many objections Dr. Shi declared its funding source which is from NIAID and the National Institute of Aging of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Paul said there’s no question that the NIH was funding this research in Wuhan. “The only real debate is over whether or not it was gain of function. But in the research, we presented the evidence that she took two viruses, the genes for the S protein to two viruses, bat viruses that she found in a cave, and she melded them or merged or recombined them with the backbone of a virus called the SARS virus. Now the SARS virus is like the one we are dealing with now. COVID-19 was a virus from 2004 that had 15% mortality. It wasn’t very transmissible, but it was much more deadly than what we have. So she’s experimenting with a virus that had a 15% mortality, merging it with two new viruses she found in a cave to create a virus that does not exist in nature. And then she proves that it can infect human cells.”
How can you say that’s not gain-of-function? It’s a dance and you’re dancing around this because you’re trying to obscure responsibility for 4 million people dying around the world from a pandemic,” Paul responded.
After Paul’s time expired, Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) was the next lawmaker up, and with a sympathetic but bemused expression, she offered Fauci an opportunity to “counteract these attacks on his integrity that they have all just witnessed.”
“I don’t think I have anything further to say,” Fauci said. “This is a pattern that Senator Paul has been doing now at multiple hearings based on no reality. He keeps talking about gain-of-function. This has been evaluated multiple times by qualified people to not fall under the gain-of-function definition.”
Paul is not alone to question Fauci, scientists with differing opinions about COVID-19 origins than Dr. Anthony Fauci keep it to themselves because the top disease expert controls much of their funding, Sen. Rand Paul. He said that he receives letters from scientists that routinely contradict Fauci’s prescriptions and public statements, but that they all offer the same regret: that they are afraid to speak out against what the health care bureaucrat says. “They are very distrustful of what he is saying. They don’t think he is making sense and reading the science accurately.
Adding to the fury one individual commented “Yes and he was in charge of getting a vaccine for HIV about 50 years ago. Still no vaccine for it”!
NIH’s RePORTER website said the agency provided $15.2 million to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance over the years, with $3.74 million toward understanding bat coronavirus emergence. Daszak maintained a long working relationship with Wuhan lab “bat lady” Shi Zhengli, sending her lab at least $600,000 in NIH funding. Daszak was also part of the World Health Organization-China team that dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as “extremely unlikely” earlier this year.
Paul, who recovered from the virus last year and has said he will not be vaccinated, has called Fauci a “petty tyrant” and accused him of writing “science fiction” while promoting unnecessary health restrictions. Fauci has maintained Paul is promoting false health facts and downplaying the coronavirus.
It was just the latest entry in a long line of scuffles between the two figures who represent the wide rift in beliefs around COVID-19 that caused the global pandemic. Rand is accusing Fauci of fear-mongering rhetoric and what he says is incorrect praise of so-called lockdown measures implemented to stem the spread of the virus since the pandemic began.
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqUOcVwRUtc
