Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) announced he sent an “official criminal referral” of Dr. Anthony Fauci to the DOJ over the latter’s COVID testimony.
Leslie wrote about Paul’s movements last week.
Paul said on FOX News this morning:
“So what happens now because [Fauci] said in front of you there’s no gain-of-function research, it might be semantics, his definition of gain-of-function might be different than yours, and you can go into that, and now this email is resurfacing,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked.“There’s probably never been a government official caught more red-handed, lying to us,” Paul said. “He has proved the lie in his own words. So at first he kind of acted like ‘Oh we don’t have anything to do with the research over there, we don’t fund the research in Wuhan, so we found the actual scientific papers, we found the grant number proving it came from his agency. And then he said, ‘Oh well, we’re funding it, but it’s not gain-of-function. My experts up and down have looked at this and it’s not gain-of-function.’ We have contemporaneous documents, documents from February of 2020 in the height of the beginning of the pandemic, where he is saying privately ‘We’re suspicious that this virus could have come from the lab because they’re doing gain-of-function research.’ He describes the projects, that I had described to him a year later, which he said ‘Oh, there’s nothing to see here.’ We have in his own words admitting it was gain of function, admitting they funded it and admitting it gave them suspicion to the possibility this pandemic came from the lab.”“We have him dead to rights, the problem is this: we have Merrick Garland who I think is a pure-rank partisan. I don’t think he’ll ever be prosecuted. We also have a Democrat Party that is happy to have paid him more than the president, more than any president makes and he actually got a million dollars from a private foundation while he was still a public servant. Everything about this is rotten to the core and if we don’t bring him to justice we’ll never get the control we need on this type of research to try and prevent it from happening again,” Paul continued.Paul explained the referral to the DOJ is for lying to Congress and can carry a five-year sentence. Paul said Fauci made a “judgment error.”
Paul and Fauci had numerous encounters since COVID. People bashed Paul, called him a conspiracy theorist and hater of science.
People forget that Paul graduated from Duke Medical School and practiced ophthalmology before his senate career.
So Paul knows a thing or two about medicine.
But Paul, one of the OG Tea Party members and government skeptic like his father, also doubted Fauci’s truthfulness regarding NIH’s relationship with the Wuhan lab.
From Fox News:
Paul pointed to an email from February 2020 in which Fauci detailed a call with British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar, who was director of the Wellcome Trust at the time. According to Fauci, those on the task-force call, including Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and other “highly credible” scientists with expertise in evolutionary biology, expressed concern about the “fact upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted.””The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan,” Fauci wrote, according to a screenshot of the newly unredacted email shared by RealClearPolitics White House reporter Philip Wegmann.
The issue stems from Fauci’s 2021 testimony in front of Congress:
During a heated exchange, Fauci insisted he had “never lied before Congress” during prior testimony in May, telling Paul that “you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Fauci further denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research, despite Paul citing a journal article titled “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses.”Paul, who graduated from Duke University School of Medicine and was a practicing doctor before being elected to Congress, noted how the paper’s author credits the NIH and lists the actual number of the grant given by the NIH. The author took two bat coronavirus spike genes and combined them with SARs-related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature, and the lab-created viruses were then shown to replicate in humans, Paul said during the July congressional hearing.”Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans,” he said.Fauci said the paper to which Paul referred “was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function.””Let’s read from the NIH definition of ‘gain of function,'” Paul said. “This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that ‘scientific research that increases the transmissibility among mammals is gain of function.’ They took animal viruses that only occur in animals, and they increased their transmissibility to humans. How you can 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.”
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