In a stunning admission of guilt, Anthony Fauci admitted in a letter to Congress that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did indeed provide gain-of-function funding to Chinese experiments dealing with coronavirus strains in bats, as reported by Fox News.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), confessed in a letter to the House Oversight Committee’s ranking Republican member, Congressman James Comer (R-Ky.), that a “limited experiment” was carried out as a result of this funding, which used funds collected from American taxpayers.
Following this revelation, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) took to Fox News to react to this announcement; Senator Paul, who is a doctor of ophthalmology, had been one of the earliest and most vocal members of Congress on the subject of gain-of-function research, accusing Fauci early on of funding the very kinds of Chinese experiments that ultimately led to the creation of the coronavirus strain that has spread across the world.
“Five million people died from a virus that came out of a lab,” Paul said in the interview. “Wouldn’t we want to know, wouldn’t we want to prevent this from happening again? This virus is very deadly, what if we had a virus that had a 15% mortality rate?”
Senator Paul and Fauci have clashed in the past on the matter in congressional hearings, with each accusing the other of lying. Fauci claimed, under oath, that neither the NIH or the NIAID had provided any funding to the lab at the heart of all questions about the origins of the virus, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. However, a prominent Chinese scientist at the WIV, Dr. Shi Zhengli, admitted in a published paper that Fauci and the NIAID were sponsors of her research, which focused on various strains of the coronavirus.
In his most recent interview, Senator Paul cited a quote from Fauci back in 2012, where Fauci addressed the then-hypothetical scenario of a pandemic breaking out as a result of controlled experiments with deadly viruses.
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” Fauci asked 9 years ago. “Scientists working in this field might say, as indeed I have said, that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
Senator Paul, who has already referred Fauci to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation, said that Fauci must “be held accountable” for helping to create a climate of fear in the medical profession, “where doctors are afraid to speak out because they will cut out their research funding, doctors who have talked about innovative treatment to try to help people survive COVID are being lectured and told we will take your license.”
“This is the kind of thing, this top-down centralization of medical authority,” Paul continued, “it’s not good for our country and it’s not good for innovation.”