Rand Paul says he's 'worried' US funding is STILL allowing Chinese to run a bioweapons program as evidence ramps up that COVID-19 leaked from Wuhan lab
Rand Paul said Saturday that he is worried U.S. funding is still being used by the Chinese to develop biological weapons.
'I'm very worried that this stuff still goes on and that the U.S. government's been funding it,' Paul told Fox News' Jeanine Pirro on Saturday.
Paul argued that China likely used the 'gain of function,' which means it mutated a virus that usually transmits just among animals so it could jump to humans and in dong so, potentially become more dangerous or deadly.
'We've got a lot of evidence pointing to this lab now,' the Kentucky senator argued, noting that when he proposed stopping funding to this research, all Democrats got on board.
Both Paul and former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are warning that there is ongoing research and experimentation in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), raising suspicions of another potential deadly virus leak.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said Saturday that he is 'worried' China is still using U.S. funding to do biological warfare experiments that could lead to another virus leak as increasing evidence comes out that COVID-19 was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Comments come as increasing evidence emerges that coronavirus was developed in China and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a biological weapon
Pompeo told Fox News on Friday that WIV is conducting secret military research.
The former Donald Trump aide also claimed there is 'enormous evidence' that the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from the lab in China.
'What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts connected to the People's Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research,' Pompeo said in an interview with Fox.
'They refuse to tell us what it was, they refuse to describe the nature of either of those, they refuse to allow access to the World Health Organization,' he added. 'That coverup alone suggests that there's a lot more that we need to know.'
'That virology lab is still up and running. It's still probably conducting the same kinds of research it was conducting that may have well led to this virus escaping from that laboratory,' he said.
'Only the Chinese Communist Party knows the answer, the world deserves the answers and they have to tell us, I hope there will be bipartisan push to demand and hold accountable,' said Pompeo.
Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and secretary of state, told Fox News Friday that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting secret military research
Joe Biden ordered the government's premiere research laboratories to join the search for the true origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The president delivers remarks at the annual Memorial Day Service at Veterans Memorial Park in Delaware on Sunday, May 30
He spoke after President Joe Biden ordered an intensive 90-day probe to reinvestigate the possibility of a lab leak origin in the pandemic.
'It's really unfortunate they took the position early on that there was nothing to see here,' Pompeo said in response to the new probe.
'I'm glad now that they're looking at this. I hope it's a serious investigation when they say they are giving 90 days for the intelligence community to look at this. The intelligence community has been looking at this for an awfully long time,' he said.
Pompeo, a former CIA spy chief, has promoted the lab leak theory since the early days of the pandemic, a theory that until recently much of the U.S. media and academia scoffed at as a fringe conspiracy theory.
'I've known since spring of last year, 2020, when I first spoke about this that there is enormous evidence that this escaped from that laboratory in Wuhan,' he said on Saturday.
'We know there were people who got sick there, scientists who got sick there, we know they were doing the gain of function research -- essentially taking viruses and making them more contagious, potentially more lethal, this administration has to get after this.'
Workers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology are seen in February. The lab has come under new scrutiny as experts finally take seriously a lab leak as a possible origin of the pandemic
'This administration has to get after this. I hope they will continue the work that we were engaged in,' said Pompeo. 'This is important work. We have to know how this happened so we can make sure it never happens again.'
It is not the first time Pompeo has claimed links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Chinese military.
In the final days of the Trump administration, the Pompeo-led State Department issued a statement stating 'the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China's military.'
'The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017,' the department said.
It also that that 'a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection.'
It follows word of an explosive new study that purports to show that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
DailyMail.com exclusively obtained the 22-page paper which is set to be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery. In it, researchers describe their months-long 'forensic analysis' into experiments done at the Wuhan lab between 2002 and 2019
The paper's authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had 'prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China ' for a year - but were ignored by academics and major journals.
The shocking allegations in the study, obtained by DailyMail.com before publication, include accusations of 'deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data' at Chinese labs.
Biden on Wednesday ordered the 17 National Labs run by the Department of Energy to assist the intelligence community in a 90-day sprint to examine whether the virus leaked from a lab in China .
The labs have been tapped 'because of their ability to crunch massive amounts of data' with their advanced supercomputers, a White House official told CNN .
The government is not revealing exactly what kind of data is being submitted for analysis, but experts say it is likely previously gathered intelligence such as signal intercepts or biological evidence.
Intelligence agencies regularly collect more raw data than their analysts are able to effectively pore through, and the application of advanced algorithms to seek patterns in the massive data set could offer new breakthroughs.
Equipment is seen at Livermore National Laboratory in California, one of the 17 National Laboratories to been called in to assist intelligence agencies in crunching data
'We want the science to be a big part of this,' the White House official told CNN. 'We are going to use the full resources of our intelligence and scientific community to try to get to the bottom of this.'
Biden is also urging U.S. intelligence agencies and those of allies to hunt for new information that could shed light on whether China covered up a lab leak.
Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, said the Biden administration's response was 'better late than never, but far from adequate.'
'Our intelligence community has been looking at this now for 15 months. They've done good work on it, but in the end the answer lies in the hands of Chinese communists, not people working for American intelligence agencies,' he told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
Cotton said that officials in Beijing have not been forthcoming about how the pandemic began. 'We should be insisting that they come clean, that they provide us a clear and unvarnished look at what was happening in the Wuhan labs,' he said.
Circumstantial evidence has long raised questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers were known to be conducting experiments on bat coronavirus strains similar to the one responsible for COVID-19.
China insisted early and often that the virus did not leak from the lab, claiming that crossover to humans must have occurred at a 'wet market' in Wuhan that sold live animals.
Perhaps driven by animosity for Donald Trump, who embraced the lab leak theory early on, the mainstream U.S. media and academics heaped scorn on the possibility, calling it an unhinged conspiracy theory.
But new evidence, including reports of three workers at the Wuhan lab who fell seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, has forced a sober reassessment among doubters.
Frustration with China increased this week after Beijing said that it would not participate in any further investigations by the World Health Organization.
Biden rebuked China in his announcement of the new intelligence review, calling on allies to help 'press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence.'
