GOP Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky announced an “official criminal referral” to the Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Sen. Paul pointed to an email from February 2020 in which Dr. Fauci detailed a call with Jeremy Farrar, a British medical researcher who was director of the Wellcome Trust at the time. Per Fauci, those on the task force call, including former Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Francis Collins, along with 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,” wrote Fauci, according to the screenshot of the newly unredacted email and shared by Philip Wegmann, RealClearPolitics White House reporter.
“This directly contradicts everything he said in committee hearing to me, denying absolutely that they funded any gain of function, and it’s absolutely a lie. That’s why I sent an official criminal referral to the DOJ,” wrote Paul on “X,” formerly known as Twitter, Saturday.
Paul reminded Fauci, former medical adviser to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in July 2021, that lying to Congress is a federal crime and suggested that the NIAID director had done so regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Covid-19 gain-of-function research that was conducted.
Fauci maintains he has “never lied before Congress”
During a fiery exchange, Fauci insisted he had “never lied before Congress” during prior testimony in May and told Paul, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Dr. Fauci further denied the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research, despite Senator Paul’s citing a journal article titled, “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses.”
Paul noted the author of the paper credits the NIH and lists the actual number of the grant given by the NIH. Senator Paul, who is a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine and was a practicing physician before being elected to Congress, surmised from the article during the congressional hearing that the author took two bat coronavirus bat genes and combined them with SARs-related backbone to then create new viruses not found in nature. The lab-created viruses were then seen to replicate in humans.
“Viruses that in nature only affect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans,” said Paul.
Dr. Fauci said the paper Senator Paul referred to “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. This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that ‘scientific research that increases the transmissibility among mammals in gain of function.’ They took animal viruses that only occur in animals, and they increased their transmissibility to humans,” said Paul. “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 four million people dying around the world from a pandemic.”
