Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday morning that while there's no hard proof yet regarding the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's becoming clearer that Dr. Anthony Fauci "could be culpable for the entire pandemic."
In an interview with "Fox & Friends," the Republican senator pointed out that the sole U.S. representative of the World Health Organization team investigating the origin of the pandemic was Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance.
His organization was the recipient of funds from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is emerging as the likely origin of the pandemic.
"So NIH gave the money to EcoHealth ... and the head of EcoHealth – they got him to investigate whether Wuhan was doing anything inappropriate in their lab," Paul said.
"But if they were, then wouldn’t he be culpable?" the Kentucky lawmaker asked. "Doesn’t he have a self-interest in smoothing things over?"
Ultimately, however, Paul said, there's someone else who bears more responsibility.
"Dr. Fauci could be culpable for the entire pandemic," he said.
On Tuesday, Paul confronted Fauci with the increasingly plausible lab-leak theory of the origin of the novel coronavirus, asking him directly if the NIH funded dangerous "gain-of-function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci declared "the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute." The risky research increases the virulence and transmissiblity of viruses to prepare vaccines and treatments in case of an outbreak.
What is clear is that NIH and the branch Fauci has directed since 1984, the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), provided funding to the Wuhan lab.
The Wuhan lab's chief scientist, Dr. Shi Zhengli, notes funding by NIAID in a research article published Nov. 30, 2017, titled "Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus".
The question is whether or not that research was "gain-of-function," for which the U.S. temporarily banned funding in 2014.
Paul points to a review of Shi's paper by MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt that concluded "certain techniques that the researchers used seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function."
In May 2017, Americans scientists who had received grants from Fauci's NIAID headlined a conference hosted by the Wuhan lab focusing on "gain of function research and gene editing," the National Pulse reported Wednesday.
Replies