'He told me it wasn't gain of function, but admitted it in these emails': Rand Paul says Fauci lied to him over US-funded research that was being carried out in Wuhan lab and demands he is fired
Republican Sen. Rand Paul demanded Dr. Anthony Fauci be fired and claimed that he lied to him about gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was allegedly funded by the United States.
Paul appeared on Fox News' The Ingraham Angle where he claimed that thousands of emails revealed by Buzzfeed News and the Washington Post proved Fauci may have been in-part responsible for the development of COVID-19.
At a Senate hearing last month, Paul accused the National Institutes of Health of funding Chinese research into bat coronaviruses that infect humans.
But Fauci told Paul: 'You are entirely and completely incorrect. The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute.'
On Wednesday, the junior senator from Kentucky said that Fauci bears 'moral culpability' while asserting that COVID-19 was created by the Wuhan Institute of Virology through funding from the NIH, a theory which has not been proven.
Fauci appeared in an interview with NewsNation Now anchor Leland Vittert on The Donlon Report in which he defended a grant the United States had provided the Wuhan lab.
Rand Paul appeared on The Ingraham Angle where he claimed revealed emails proved Fauci may have been in-part responsible for the development of COVID-19
The junior senator from Kentucky said Fauci bears 'moral culpability' for the pandemic and should be fired from his government roles
Paul asserted COVID-19 was created by the Wuhan Institute of Virology through National Institute of Health funding, a theory which has not been proven. Paul said: 'In his email, in the subject line, he says 'gain of function research.' He was admitting it to his private underlings seven to eight months ago'
Scientists have primarily focused their beliefs about COVID-19 on the theory that it spread naturally from a bat to an intermediary animal before infecting humans.
Claims that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been laughed off as conspiracy theories - but even researchers at a number of top universities like Harvard and Cambridge have suggested in a letter that the 'hypotheses' cannot be ruled out until there is more evidence.
In gain-of-function research, scientists alter organisms and diseases to study how they could become deadlier or more transmissible. The field of virology widely relies on such studies.
Fauci, who serves as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under the umbrella of the NIH, has denied that the NIH directly funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
However, Paul asserted to Fox News host Laura Ingraham that the recently reveals emails show Fauci admitted to funding gain-of-function research.
'I think we've had a sea change of opinion. Everybody left-of-center was saying this was a conspiracy, no way it could have happened in the Wuhan lab. Now even Dr. Fauci is saying we should investigate it,' Paul said.
'But the emails paint a disturbing picture, a disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci form the very beginning worrying that he had been funding gain of function research. And he knows it to this day but hasn't admitted it.'
Paul claimed in the interview that 'there is a lot of evidence' that Fauci's views on the Wuhan lab-leak theory were compromised by a 'conflict of interest.'
'If it turns out this virus came from the Wuhan lab, which it looks like it did, that there's a great deal of culpability in that he was a big supporter of the funding,' Paul said.
'But he was also a big supporter to this day of saying that we can trust the Chinese on this, that we can trust Chinese scientists and I think that's quite naïve and really should preclude him form the position that he's in.'
Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed recent revelations that he was warned by scientist at start of pandemic that COVID-19 may have been 'engineered'
Fauci made his comments in an interview with NewsNation Now anchor Leland Vittert on The Donlon Report where he also admitted he 'can't guarantee everything that is going on in the Wuhan lab'
The NIH awarded a $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which is based in the United States, to study the risk of coronaviruses emerging from bats in 2014. EcoHealth Alliance in turn distributed nearly $600,000 of that funding to its collaborator, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Paul claimed during the Fox News interview that Fauci's emails show he was worried the NIH funded gain-of-function research as early as last February during the emergence of the pandemic.
'In his email, in the subject line, he says 'gain of function research.' He was admitting it to his private underlings seven to eight months ago,' Paul said.
In a February 1, 2020 email obtained by Buzzfeed News, Principal NIAID Director Hugh Auschincloss wrote to Fauci to discuss a paper the top infectious disease expert had sent him appearing to question if NIH grants funded gain of function research relating to coronaviruses.
In the email to Fauci, Auschincloss noted that a colleague would 'try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.'
When Ingraham asked Paul if Fauci could face criminal culpability, he replied: 'At the very least, there is moral culpability.'
Fauci, who is considered America's top expert on infectious disease, also explained why scientists focused their theories on the natural transmission from bats rather than an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab
Researchers at a number of top universities have recently penned a letter claiming that theories that COVID-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab 'remain viable'
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is about 20 miles from the Huanan Seafood Market where the first coronavirus cases are reported to have occurred
Paul's interview on Wednesday came as Fauci dismissed recent revelations that he was warned at the start of pandemic that COVID-19 may have been 'engineered' and said that the emails are 'really ripe to be taken out of context.'
Fauci also admitted on The Donlon Report that he 'can't guarantee everything that is going on in the Wuhan lab.'
Considered America's top expert on infectious disease, Fauci also explained why scientists focused their theories on the natural transmission from bats to humans through an intermediary species.
The interview comes after a trove of 3,200 of Fauci's emails from January to June 2020 were obtained and published by Buzzfeed on Tuesday that showed leading virus experts warned him COVID-19 may have been created in a lab while he publicly played such claims down.
'The only trouble is they are really ripe to be taken out of context where someone can snip out a sentence in an email without showing the other emails, and say 'based on an email from Dr. Fauci, he said such and such' where you don't really have the full context,' Fauci said in the interview.
Another trove of emails, published by the Washington Post, also revealed his cozy relationship with China's top infectious disease expert Dr. George Gao - the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention - during the early days of the pandemic in March and April of last year.
'Let's put things in context ... We're not talking about the Chinese Communist Party. We're not talking about the Chinese military. We're talking about scientists that we've had relationships for years,' Fauci said.
Fauci then defended his relationship with Gao, a colleague of Fauci's 'for many years' and a member of the United States National Academy of Scientists.
'The scientists there, and others that we dealt with the original SARS, with the influenza virtually every year, the scientists are experienced,' Fauci said.
Fauci added that the Wuhan lab 'is a very large lab to the tune of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.'
'The grant that we're talking about was $600,000 over five years for an average of about $125,000 to $140,000 a year,' Fauci said.
He added: 'I can't guarantee everything that is going on in the Wuhan lab, I can't do that. But it is our obligation as scientists and public health individuals to study the animal-human interface' in the aftermath of the original SARS virus in 2002.
Fauci explained that SARS-CoV-1 'was clearly a jumping of species from a bat, to a civic cat, to a human.'
'So it was incumbent upon us to study the animal-human interface and to understand what potential these viruses have of infecting humans which then might damage the United States,' Fauci said.
'So you don't want to go to Hoboken, New Jersey or to Fairfax, Virginia to be studying the bat human interface that might lead to an outbreak. You go to China.'
