Sen. Rand Paul demanded that Dr. Anthony Fauci be fired for his ‘lack of judgment’ as he claimed on Sunday that President Biden’s top medical adviser lied about National Institutes of Health-funded research in Wuhan, China.
‘He should be fired,’ he told ‘Axios on HBO.’
‘The thing is, is just for lack of judgment if nothing else, and I, you know, he’s probably never going to admit that he lied, he’s going to continue to dissemble and try to work around the truth and massage the truth.’
His outburst is just the most recent broadside in a months-long feud.
The latest twist came last week when the NIH admitted to funding research on bat coronaviruses, to test different spike proteins, in the Wuhan lab that is at the center of COVID-19 origin theories.
It comes after Fauci testified on multiple occasions before Congress than U.S. taxpayers never financed so called ‘gain-of-function research.’
Sen. Rand Paul resumed his attacks on Anthony Fauci, demanding he be fired for ‘lying’ to Congress over whether U.S. taxpayers funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan
Fauci, the country’s top infectious diseases experts, said Paul didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘It’s just not correct,’ he said
The revelation came in a letter sent to Kentucky congressman James Comer, in which NIH’s principal deputy director Lawrence A. Tabak refers to a ‘limited experiment’ conducted to test whether ‘spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model,’ at the Wuhan lab.
According to Tabak, the mice infected with the modified bat virus ‘became sicker’ than those infected with the unmodified bat virus, according to unpublished data.
He wrote that the finding was an ‘unexpected result of the research,’ and that the viruses studied were ‘genetically very distant’ from the one that causes COVID-19.
The result is a tussle over how to define ‘gain of function.’
‘In the letter they acknowledge that yes, the viruses did gain in function, they became more dangerous,’ said Paul.
‘So they’ve created a virus that doesn’t exist in nature to become more dangerous. That is gain of function.’
‘Now they try to justify it by saying well it was an unexpected result.
‘I’m not sure I buy that.
‘Think about it you take an unknown virus, you combine it with another virus and you get a super virus.
‘You have no idea whether it gains functions or loses function, that’s what the experiment is, but I don’t know how anybody could argue that that’s not gain of function research.’
The lab in Wuhan, China, is at the center of theories that COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory rather than have emerged naturally in the wild from a host species
Mike Allen, the interviewer for Axios, told Paul that Biden was unlikely to fire Fauci.
Paul said he would accept an investigation into the gain-of-function research.
Fauci rejected his interpretation of the research during an interview on ABC’s ‘This Week’ on Sunday.
‘The funding at the Wuhan Institute was to be able to determine what is out there in the environment, in bat viruses in China,’ he said.
‘And the research was very strictly under what we call a framework of oversight of the type of research.
‘And under those conditions which we have explained very, very clearly, does not constitute research of gain of function of concern.
‘There are people who interpret it that way, but when you look at the framework under which the guidance is, that is not the case.
‘So I have to respectfully disagree with Senator Paul. He is not correct that we lied or misled the Congress.
‘It’s just not correct.’
He also said it was ‘molecularly impossible’ for the viruses being studied to turn into COVID-19 because they were very distant genetically from each other.
On Monday, social media users called for the arrest of Fauci after his agency was found to have used taxpayer funds to finance experiments on dogs.
The hashtag #ArrestFauci was trending on Twitter over the weekend, amplifying the outrage over the experiments, including one which saw beagles trapped in cages so flies could eat them, and another where they were ‘debarked’ before being pumped with drugs and killed.
One of the most disturbing incidents funded by Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases involved $375,000 given to a Tunisian research lab.
There, puppies had their heads held in cages, before being left for sand flies to eat them alive for research purposes.
