In a testy exchange with Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci denied committing perjury in May when he said his agency did not subsidize dangerous experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“You do not know what you are talking about,” Fauci fumed after the senator warned him that lying to Congress is a felony.
But Paul did know. Just as he knew two months ago, when he blasted Fauci during a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Paul correctly said U.S taxpayers subsidized the institute, where a scientist known as the “Bat Lady” was supervising the creation of souped-up viruses.
Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denied funding the lab’s potentially catastrophic experiments. He denied it again Tuesday.
Paul told Fox talker Sean Hannity that he will send a criminal referral about Fauci’s testimony to the Department of Justice.
SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, almost certainly leaked from an institute lab.
Fauci: Not Gain of Function
After explaining that perjury is a felony, Paul reminded Fauci of his false testimony in May. Then Paul entered into the record a research paper by Dr. Zheng-Li Shi, which acknowledged funding from the National Institutes for Health.
Shi is the “Bat Lady;” NIH is the parent agency for Fauci’s NIAID.
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The Bat Lady, Paul said, “credits the NIH and lists the actual number of the grant.” Shi’s paper describes experiments in which “she took two bat coronavirus genes, spike genes, and combined them with a SARS related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature.”
Those viruses “were shown to replicate in humans,” Paul continued:
These experiments combined genetic information from different coronaviruses that infect animals, but not humans, to create novel artificial viruses able to infect human cells. Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wu Han lab to gain the function of infecting humans. This research fits the definition of the research that the NIH said was subject to the pause in 2014 to 2017, a pause in funding on gain of function, but the NIH failed to recognize this, defines it away, and it never came under any scrutiny. Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist from Rutgers, described this research in Wu Han as the Wu Han lab used NIH funding to construct novel chimeric SARS related to coronaviruses able to infect human cells and laboratory animals. This is high risk research that creates new potential pandemic pathogens, potential pandemic pathogens that exist only in the lab, not in nature. This research matches … these are Dr. Ebright’s words … This research matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research, done entirely in Wuhan, for which there was supposed to be a federal pause. Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gains of function research in Wu Han.
In his 11,000-word piece for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about the experiments at the lab, Nicholas Wade quoted Ebright as saying the same thing.
Fauci denied the truth:
Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function.
Replied Paul, “you take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?” Fauci insisted that the experiment Paul described was not gain-of-function research:
Fauci: And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially, you do not know what you are talking about, okay? You get one person … can I answer?
Paul: This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals 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 is not gain of function…
Fauci: It is not.
Paul told Fauci that the officials responsible for subsidizing the lab, including Fauci, will be held responsible.
In a tweet Tuesday afternoon, Paul again posted the Bat Lady’s research paper, and quoted a biologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt reviewed this paper that was published with financial assistance from Dr. Fauci’s NIH/NIAID and concluded “certain techniques that the researchers used seemed to meet the definition of gain-of-function”
NIAID Backs Gain-of-Function
That U.S. taxpayers, via NIH and Fauci’s own agency, subsidized the Bat Lady’s perilous activities is without doubt.
As The New American reported in May, Newsweek revealed the subsidies from Fauci outfit:
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
Fox News reported U.S and Canadian subsidies for the institute.
The evidence shows that SARS-Cov-2 almost certainly escaped a lab at the institute. Wade reported that the Wuhan lab has the same level of biosecurity as a dental office.
