Senator Rand Paul is calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be fired over his "lack of judgment" throughout the pandemic. Paul said that the chief medical adviser lied about research the National Institutes of Health-funded in Wuhan, China.
The Republican senator from Kentucky spoke about the doctor in an interview with Axios, saying "he should be fired."
"The thing is, is just for lack of judgment of 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," he said in the interview.
This is not the first time that Paul has fired shots at the doctor. During Senate hearings, this summer the two faced off going back and forth over funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan laboratory.
Last month, Paul even went as far as saying Fauci deserves a five-year prison sentence for lying to Congress. These calls have only been intensified as the NIH has now admitted to funding gain-of-function research.
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The principal deputy director for the NIH, Lawrence Tabak, wrote a letter to Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who serves as a ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The letter sent last week contained details regarding an NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that conducted an experiment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, The Hill reported.
Unpublished data showed that the mice in the laboratory infected with one bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with a different bat coronavirus, according to the letter.
The letter from Tabak said that the finding was "an unexpected result of the research," but the viruses examined in the experiment "were genetically very distant from SARS-CoV-2."
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According to Paul, the letter clearly shows that the experiment performed in the lab involved gain-of-function research.
"In the letter, they acknowledge that yes, the viruses did gain in function, they became more dangerous. So they've created a virus that doesn't exist in nature to become more dangerous, that is gain of function," Paul said.
Paul went on to talk about Labak's justification for the research, and he doesn't see an argument supporting that gain-of-function research wasn't done in the lab.
"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," he added.
