Newly released emails from White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci prove that he knew the Wuhan Institute of Virology was carrying out dangerous gain-of-function research, Sen. Rand Paul charged Wednesday night.
“The emails paint a disturbing picture, a disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci, from the very beginning, worrying that he had been funding gain-of-function research,” Paul (R-Ky.) told Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” “and he knows it to this day, but hasn’t admitted it.”
Paul, who has repeatedly clashed with Fauci over various issues related to the pandemic, was referring to a Feb. 1, 2020, email Fauci sent to his top deputy at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Hugh Auchincloss. The email was among 3,200 pages of messages to and from Fauci obtained by BuzzFeed News earlier this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
“Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM,” Fauci wrote. “Keep your cell phone on … Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”
The NIAID director attached a PDF of a 2015 paper published in the journal Nature Medicine titled: “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.” One of the paper’s authors was Dr. Shi Zhengli, a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher known as the “bat woman” for her work on bat coronaviruses. Fauci also sent the paper to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Deputy Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak.
“The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause [in October 2014] but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH,” Auchincloss emailed Fauci later in the day. “Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”
“OK. Stay tuned,” Fauci answered.
“Two weeks ago in committee hearing, he [Fauci] said they did not fund any gain-of-function research,” Paul said Wednesday night. “I quoted that specific paper … He’s worried about this in February of last year, but only two weeks ago he tells me, ‘Oh, it wasn’t gain-of-function research.'”
Fauci and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins have denied to lawmakers that any grant money for the Wuhan Institute of Virology was meant for gain-of-function research, defined by Fauci as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans.”
While both Fauci and Collins have previously admitted there’s no way of knowing whether researchers in Wuhan carried out undisclosed gain-of-function research, Fauci insisted during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing last week that such work “categorically was not done.”
“We’re not talking about the Communist Chinese Party,” Fauci told NewsNation Wednesday night. “We’re not talking about the Chinese military. We’re talking about scientists that we’ve had relationships [with] for years.”
“There’s a lot of evidence that he [Fauci] has a great deal of conflict of interest and that if it turns out this virus came from the Wuhan lab — which it looks like it did — that there’s a great deal of culpability and that he was a big supporter of the funding,” Paul said. “But he also was a big supporter, to this day, of saying, ‘We can trust the Chinese on this. We can trust the Chinese scientists,’ and I think that’s quite naïve and really should preclude him from the position that he’s in.”