Sen. Rand Paul: Fauci not honest about Wuhan Lab funding, COVID-19 origins

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) - It’s a clash against the doctors--U.S. Senator and Doctor, Rand Paul, spoke with WBKO News about his exchange with Dr. Anthony Fauci on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

The two sparring over the origins of COVID-19, who helped fund research and allegations that Fauci lied to Congress while under oath about Gain of Function research. At one point Dr. Fauci telling Paul, “You do not know what you’re talking about. Quite frankly. I want to say that officially.”

Brandon Jarrett spoke with Dr. Paul during a one-on-one interview to ask him what he knows, “officially”.

“Well, you know, we presented a significant amount of evidence, we presented research from 2017. From Dr. Shi, she’s the bat scientist, that’s prominent, that leads the lab in Wuhan. In her research, she acknowledges that Dr. Fauci and NIH gave her money. In fact, she lists the grant number. So there’s no question that the NIH was funding her research,” said Paul. “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’re 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.”

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We asked Dr. Paul why his definition of Gain of Function research differs from Fauci’s.

“I think he has self-interest and not being attached to this research, because more and more of the evidence is pointing towards the virus having come out of that lab, if it did, you can see how moral responsibility or culpability attaches to Dr. Fauci because he had the poor judgment to fund this lab. So I think it was a mistake to fund the lab in Wuhan period, because I don’t think the Chinese government or military has been very forthcoming,” said Dr. Paul. “There are reports that the Chinese military has actually been working on weaponizing viruses. So I think it was a poor judgment. Even as much as a month ago, Dr. Fauci was asking the Judiciary Committee whether he still trusted the scientists and the Chinese scientists. And he says, Oh, of course, he was also asked in 2012, if a bug should escape, if a virus should infect a researcher, escape and become a pandemic, what then? And he said, Well, the science and the research is worth it, even if a pandemic should occur.”

“So this to me shows incredibly poor judgment, not wisdom, poor judgment. And really, there’s a possibility we are suffering from his poor judgment. This research still goes on in the United States, we should want to know, you know if the NIH is still funding this type of research in North Carolina? And in Galveston, do we want this to occur? Are we worried that we could have the worst virus leak out of the lab? So these are important questions, and instead of really answering any of the direct questions I had, it became sort of an ad hominem attack with him simply calling names,” said Paul.

Q: “Dr. Fauci says that there’s no correlation between the research that was conducted with that grant as it pertains to gain of function research. What other information can you tell the American public? What other proof do you have?

“They have looked to see if this came from animals naturally. This is what Dr. Fauci started saying early on, but when he did realize that his emails realize on January 31, he gets very urgent messages from four scientists saying that it looks like this virus was manipulated in the lab. He also has a paper that he sends to his assistant that is a gain of function paper that NIH funded and their alarm that it didn’t go through any kind of process or screening that it was supposed to be going through this type of screening, they were alarmed that they would be associated with this,” said Paul. “They organized, including the guy that was funding the research lab, Peter de Zack, they organized a letter. And in the private emails are saying, hey, you don’t sign it, you don’t sign it, because we made—we want it to appear as if it’s an independent effort that we had nothing to do with organizing this.”

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“So there was a lot of covering up, there was a lot of belief that you know, guilt would attach to them. If it looked like it came from the labs, this is a very organized effort all along. Now they’ve tried to find out if this came from animals, naturally, they’ve tested 80,000 animals from the wet market to see if it came from the wet market, not one of them tested positive for COVID-19. They’ve also taken COVID-19 and tried to infect bats. And they found that it doesn’t infect bats very well, it seems to be most adapted to infect humans,” said Paul.

Q: “Dr. Rand Paul, you recently told Fox News that you will ask the Department of Justice for a criminal referral over Dr. Fauci his testimony and that Dr. Fauci is possibly responsible for 4 million people dying because of this pandemic? Talk about that accusation?”

“You know, we have laws in Section 1001 of the Criminal Code that says you can’t lie to Congress. So I think there needs to be repercussions. I gave him every chance to retract or modify a statement, it would have been very easy for him to say, well, there is some debate over whether or not this was gain of function. But I tend to decide with those in my administration and said it wasn’t. He just acted as if there’s no way it can be gain of function, and then call me a liar. So he really didn’t respond to the specific arguments or whether it’s gain of function or not,” said Paul.

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW BELOW:

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