As their high-profile clash continues, Sen. Rand Paul now wants Dr. Anthony Fauci to be investigated on potential criminal charges.
Paul had been feuding with Fauci over claims that the National Institutes of Health funded “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a claim Fauci says is untrue. Paul has requested for Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate whether Fauci's statements are true.
“I write to urge the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into testimony made to the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on May 11, 2021,” Paul wrote to Garland.
During the testimony on Tuesday, Paul said that it was a crime to lie to Congress, a felony that could lead up to five years in prison, and stated that “gain-of-function research was done entirely at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi and was funded by the NIH.” Fauci countered to Paul that "he did now know what he was talking about."
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At the heart of the dispute is $15.2 million that the NIH gave to EcoHealth Alliance. Of that amount, $3.74 million was earmarked for understanding bat coronavirus emergence. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth sent at least $600,000 of that money to Shi Zhengli, Wuhan’s “bat lady.”
Daszak was part of the World Health Organization team that termed the theory that a Wuhan lab leak led to the worldwide pandemic as “extremely unlikely.”
Fauci has twice testified before Congress that the NIH grant to Wuhan was not used for gain-of-function research, most recently last week in a tense exchange when Paul asked Fauci to retract his previous denial on May 11.
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“I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement,” Fauci said. “This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.”
Paul asked, “When you take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans, you’re saying that’s not gain-of-function?”
Fauci replied, “That is correct, and Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about.”
Paul doubled down. “They’re gain-of-function viruses because they were animal viruses that became more transmissible in humans, and you funded it. You won’t admit the truth.”
“If anyone is lying here, senator, it is you,” Fauci said. “This has been evaluated multiple times by qualified people to not fall under the gain-of-function definition. I have not lied before Congress.”
Gain-of-function is defined as “changes resulting in the acquisition of new, or an enhancement of existing, biological phenotypes,” according to the National Science Advisory Board.
Paul’s contention stems from a 2017 paper on Shi’s research with bats, “in which the spike genes from two uncharacterized bat SARS-related coronavirus strains, Rs4231 and Rs7327, were combined with the genomic backbone of another SARS-related coronavirus to create novel chimeric SARS-related viruses.”
“These experiments combined genetic information from different SARS-related coronaviruses and combined them to create novel, artificial viruses able to infect human cells,” the paper says.
Fauci said the work was reviewed multiple times through peer reviews in the U.S. and was determined to not fall under the gain-of-function standard., though he does admit to not having full knowledge of what the Wuhan lab is working on because of China’s veil of secrecy.
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