Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has filed a criminal referral against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Health, alleging that Fauci lied to Congress about funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Paul’s referral is based on an email that was recently released by the National Institutes of Health. The email, which was sent by Fauci to a colleague in 2017, discusses the funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In the email, Fauci states that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, the email also states that the NIH did fund research that could have led to gain-of-function research.
Paul argues that Fauci’s testimony to Congress was “absolutely a lie.” He says that Fauci’s email shows that he knew that the NIH was funding research that could have led to gain-of-function research, but he lied to Congress and said that the NIH was not funding gain-of-function research.
Red State Reported:
‘Paul pointed to an email from February 2020 in which Fauci detailed a call with British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar, who was director of the Wellcome Trust at the time. According to Fauci, those on the task force call, including Francis Collins, former Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and 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,” Fauci wrote, according to a screenshot of the newly unredacted email shared 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,” wrote Paul in the tweet below. “That’s why I sent an official criminal referral to the DOJ.”
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. https://t.co/Y191SmMiIr
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 29, 2023
