COVID-19

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is once again pushing for Anthony Fauci, former director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to face legal consequences for allegedly lying to Congress.

Paul announced Saturday that he had sent an “official criminal referral” to the Department of Justice, citing a Feb. 1, 2020, email wherein Fauci indicated that gain-of-function research had indeed been under way at “Wuhan University” — a private admission that Paul indicated contradicts the former NIAID director’s sworn statements before Congress.

TheBlaze previously reported that the Feb. 1 email, recently released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, was addressed to Robert Kadlec (then assistant secretary of Health and Human Services), Lawrence Kerr (then director of the Office of Pandemics and Emerging Threats within HHS), Brian Harrison (HHS chief of staff), and Garrett Grigsby (then director of Office of Global Affairs Department of HHS).

In the email, Fauci stated as a “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.”

Among the scientists known for their dangerous gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was Ben Hu, an EcoHealth Alliance subcontractor among the COVID-19 patients zero whose work was funded in part by Fauci’s NIAID.

Whereas Fauci was privately willing to admit to elements of the medical establishment that deadly gain-of-function research was being conducted in Wuhan, he told Congress another story altogether.

Fauci told Paul during a Senate hearing in May 2021, “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Fauci doubled down when Paul pressed him on the issue again in July 2021.

Paul asked, “Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research?”

Fauci answered, “Sen. Paul, I have never lied before the Congress. And I do not retract that statement.”

In addition to suggesting that it was the senator from Kentucky who had been lying, Fauci told Paul, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, quite frankly.”

Exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci

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It turns out, Paul, a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine and a practicing doctor before his election to Congress, had known what he was talking about.

Lawrence A. Tabak, acting director of the National Institutes of Health, admitted in an Oct. 20, 2021, letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), that the NIH had in fact funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

Concerning Fauci’s own admission that gain-of-function research had been conducted in Wuhan, Paul tweeted Saturday, “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.”

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This is not the first time Paul has implored the DOJ to hold Fauci to account.

Paul wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland in July 2021, urging him to open an investigation into Fauci’s May 11, 2021, testimony, reported the Washington Examiner. Fauci was never charged.

In response to Paul’s latest announcement, Richard Ebright, a board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, wrote, “Fauci flagrantly and repeatedly violated US-government policies implemented to prevent a lab-generated pandemic, likely caused a lab-generated pandemic, and, to evade accountability for his malfeasance, committed fraud, conspiracy to defraud, and perjury. Prosecution is overdue.”

Since the U.S. Senate cannot bring charges against Fauci, it is up to the Biden DOJ to act.

Extra to allegedly misleading Congress about the gain-of-function research, recently released emails also appear to indicate Fauci worked ardently to set the narrative that COVID-19 was not the accidental byproduct of a leak at the Chinese lab, but rather the result of a natural leap from an animal to humans.

He reportedly went so far as to commission and edit the impactful March 2020 study published in the journal Nature, “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” which he used on the national stage to downplay the lab-leak theory.

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