Dr Anthony Fauci was tonight accused of lying under oath about his knowledge of dangerous virus research in China – which is feared to have caused the pandemic.
DailyMail.com can reveal Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week calling for an investigation into whether Dr Fauci, 82, lied when he testified before a Senate committee in 2021.
In a showdown with Republicans, including Sen. Paul, in July of that year, Dr. Fauci testified that his predecessor ‘did not and does not now fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’
Dr. Fauci was the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until the end of 2022 and was responsible for signing research grants.
Yet newly released emails dated February 1, 2020 show Fauci admitting that ‘scientists at Wuhan University were known to be working on gain-of-function experiments to adapt molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses to human infection and the origin of the outbreak. Wuhan.’
Perjury is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Although the emails show that Fauci was aware of the profit-of-function going on at the lab, he never acknowledged that the NIH funded it.
But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined last month that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University received NIH funding, Sen. Paul AG said in his letter to Garland.
New emails dated February 1, 2020 show Fauci admitting that ‘Wuhan University scientists are known to be working on gain-of-function experiments to adapt molecular mechanisms associated with the bat virus to human infection and the outbreak originated in Wuhan’.
On July 13, 2023, the House Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus Epidemiology released emails sent by Dr. Fauci to Dr. Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and others regarding a conference call on the origins of Covid. Researchers
In an email, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that scientists had concerns that Covid could be genetically engineered and that these were exacerbated by the fact that gain-of-function studies were underway in Wuhan before the pandemic.
Gain-of-function research is medical research that attempts to genetically make a virus more virulent or infectious and moves beyond the natural mutations that would occur.
At the hearing in July, Fauci “stated that the NIH has never and will never fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Paul told the committee chamber.
‘And yet, the gain-of-function research was done entirely by Dr Xi at the Wuhan Institute [Zhengli] and was funded by the NIH,’ he said.
Paul then cited the WIV scientists’ paper titled ‘Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into origins of SARS coronaviruses’.
The paper specifically talks about ongoing efforts to create a ‘chimeric’ coronavirus, meaning it has been altered by humans – otherwise known as ‘gain of function’.
As it elaborates, Paul notes that the NIH was a source of funding for that research.
Senator Rand Paul had a heated exchange with Dr. Anthony Fauci at a hearing in July 2021 when he again pressed the nation’s top immunologist on whether to fund U.S. function research profits in Wuhan. Fauci replied, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Paul gave Fauci an opportunity to retract his May 11 statement claiming that the United States did not fund his $600,000 grant to profit from Function research, saying ‘Dr. Fauci, knowing that lying to Congress is a crime, do you want to retract your statement?’
Fauci got quite animated during the exchange, as he pointed the finger at Paul for being a ‘liar’.
Paul pointed to his pencil and emphasized that the evidence showed that National Institutes of Health funding went to the Wuhan lab, which claims that the money was used to research how to make the bat coronavirus transmissible to humans and more contagious and deadly.
Paul emphasized that the research recorded in the paper ‘clearly matches the definition of gain-of-function research.’
‘This paper was judged by qualified personnel up and down the chain to ensure that gain-of-function was not occurring,’ Fauci emphasized.
But newly released emails show Fauci referred to the Wuhan University scientists’ research as a ‘gain-of-function experiment’.
Dr Shi Zhengli, also known as the ‘Bat Lady’, a leading virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has spent years researching bat coronaviruses with the aim of identifying individuals with the potential to infect people.
Both he and Beijing have vehemently and publicly denied the possibility that Covid could have originated from lab tests.
Dr. Zhengli graduated from Wuhan University with a bachelor’s degree in genetics in 1987 and received a master’s degree from Wuhan Institute of Virology in 1990.
Last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University received NIH funding, Sen. Paul AG said in his letter to Garland.
It states: ‘The report notes that the NIH funded WIV’s “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” project and that it included “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in the novel coronavirus. strains are hybridized.”
‘GAO also found that NIH funded Wuhan University’s collaboration with WIV on viral detection in Yunnan Province.’
DailyMail.com has reached out to Fauci through the NIAID for comment.
As the former head of the NIH, Fauci presided over the allocation of taxpayer-funded grants for virus-enhancing research in the WIV years before the pandemic began.
A federal watchdog found that the NIH did not “effectively monitor” those tests or whether they linked pathogens to epidemic risk.
But there is still no direct evidence for a natural or synthetic source, leaving officials divided on the issue.
The Department of Energy, the FBI and several government committees believe the virus leaked from a lab, pointing to a number of coincidences and circumstantial evidence.
WIV – one of the world’s top bat virus hubs – was at the epicenter of the original Covid outbreak and suffered a number of safety and infection control breaches prior to the pandemic.
The lab considered the viruses to be the closest known relatives of Covid, and its research involved genetically engineering different strains to see how they would infect humans.
However, several other intelligence agencies think the virus was transferred from animals to humans in a natural spillover event.
Advocates of natural sources point to an early cluster at an animal slaughter market just eight miles from WIV, where animals known to harbor Covid, such as raccoon dogs, hedgehogs and rats, were kept incapacitated.