Last night, Rand Paul told Laura Ingraham that a bipartisan panel should look into the origins of COVID and whether the gain of function studies financed by Fauci had anything to do with it:
As enVolve reported yesterday, newly released emails from White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci prove that he knew the Wuhan Institute of Virology was carrying out dangerous gain-of-function research.
Sen. Rand Paul took Fauci to task over this on Wednesday night.
“The emails paint a disturbing picture, a disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci, from the very beginning, worrying that he had been funding gain-of-function research,” Paul (R-Ky.) told Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” “and he knows it to this day, but hasn’t admitted it.”
Paul was responding to an email Fauci sent to Hugh Auchincloss, his top deputy at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), on Feb. 1, 2020. Paul has often argued with Fauci over numerous topics linked to the pandemic. The email was one of 3,200 pages of communication to and from Fauci received by BuzzFeed News in response to a Freedom of Information Act request earlier this week.
“Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM,” Fauci wrote. “Keep your cell phone on … Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”
The NIAID director attached a PDF of a 2015 research titled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” which was published in the journal Nature Medicine. Dr. Shi Zhengli, a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher renowned as the “bat woman” for her work on bat coronaviruses, was one of the paper’s authors. Dr. Lawrence Tabak, Deputy Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was also sent the paper by Fauci.
“The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause [in October 2014] but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH,” Auchincloss emailed Fauci later in the day. “Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”
“OK. Stay tuned,” Fauci answered.
“Two weeks ago in committee hearing, he [Fauci] said they did not fund any gain-of-function research,” Paul said Wednesday night. “I quoted that specific paper … He’s worried about this in February of last year, but only two weeks ago he tells me, ‘Oh, it wasn’t gain-of-function research.’”
“There’s a lot of evidence that he [Fauci] has a great deal of conflict of interest and that if it turns out this virus came from the Wuhan lab — which it looks like it did — that there’s a great deal of culpability and that he was a big supporter of the funding,” Paul said. “But he also was a big supporter, to this day, of saying, ‘We can trust the Chinese on this. We can trust the Chinese scientists,’ and I think that’s quite naïve and really should preclude him from the position that he’s in.”
Paul wouldn’t go so far as to say Fauci is criminally culpable yet, but suggested that he does have a moral culpability for the lies that he told during the pandemic and highlights several of them in the interview. And as you can see from the last paragraph, he clearly believes Fauci should be fired.
