Sen. Rand Paul announced on Sunday he filed a criminal referral against former top federal immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci for allegedly false testimony he gave to Congress regarding COVID-19.
Paul referred to an email dated February 2020 in which Fauci provided a detailed account of a call with British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar, who was serving as the director of the Wellcome Trust at that time, Fox News reported.
Per Fauci, those on the task force call, including Francis Collins, the then-Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and other “highly credible” scientists with expertise in evolutionary biology, said they were concerned 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, as noted in a screenshot of a newly unredacted email posted by RealClearPolitics White House reporter Philip Wegmann.
“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,” Paul noted on the social media platform “X,” which was formerly known as Twitter until CEO Elon Musk changed it last week.
In July 2021, Paul reminded Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and medical adviser to the president, lying to Congress is a federal offense. Paul suggested that the NIAID director might have committed such an act concerning COVID-19 gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The two often engaged in heated exchanges when Fauci was called to testify. During one of them, Fauci declared that he “never lied before Congress” during testimony in May of that year, exclaiming to Paul, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Fauci went on to deny that his agency or any agency under the National Institutes of Health provided funding for “gain-of-function” research, though Paul referenced a journal article titled, “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses.”
Paul highlighted how the paper’s author credited the NIH and explicitly mentioned the grant number provided by the NIH. The author’s research involved combining two bat coronavirus spike genes with a backbone related to SARs to generate new viruses not existing in nature. Paul, who holds a medical degree from Duke University School of Medicine and served as a practicing doctor before becoming a member of Congress, inferred from the article that these lab-created viruses were demonstrated to replicate in humans.
“Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans,” Paul said.
Fauci responded that the paper 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,” Paul countered. “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,” he added.
Paul has previously filed a criminal referral against Fauci with the Justice Department for allegedly lying to Congress but it was never acted upon.
