After a heated exchange during Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Senate testimony last week, Senator Rand Paul has officially requested that the Department of Justice criminally investigate Fauci. The Washington Examiner reports Paul has concluded Fauci committed a felony by lying to Congress, and that ‘gain-of-function research was done entirely at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi and was funded by the NIH.”
The Examiner received a copy of Paul’s request sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland and reports:
“I write to urge the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into testimony made to the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on May 11, 2021,” Paul wrote to Garland.
NIH’s RePORTER website said the agency provided $15.2 million to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance over the years, with $3.74 million toward understanding bat coronavirus emergence. Daszak maintained a long working relationship with Wuhan lab “bat lady” Shi Zhengli, sending her lab at least $600,000 in NIH funding. Daszak was also part of the World Health Organization-China team that dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as “extremely unlikely” earlier this year.
Paul told Garland that a 2017 paper on Shi’s experiments at the Wuhan lab, which cited an NIAID award, included research “in which the spike genes from two uncharacterized bat SARS-related coronavirus strains, Rs4231 and Rs7327, were combined with the genomic backbone of another SARS-related coronavirus to create novel chimeric SARS-related viruses” and that “these experiments combined genetic information from different SARS-related coronaviruses and combined them to create novel, artificial viruses able to infect human cells.”
The senator told the Justice Department that contrary to Fauci’s contention, “this research, conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funded under NIAID Award R01AI110964, fits the definition of gain-of-function research.”
During last week’s heated spar between the two, Fauci told Senator Paul, “if anyone is lying here, senator, it is you” and “you don’t know what you are talking about.”
Paul had referenced comments by Dr. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, in Fauci’s testimony. “This research matches, indeed, epitomizes the definition of ‘gain-of-function research of concern’ for which federal funding was ‘paused’ in 2014-2017” said Ebright in May.
Fauci responded, “I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement…this paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.”
