UPDATE 7/21/21 7:00 AM: Following yesterday’s confrontation during a Senate hearing between Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease bureaucrat at the National Institutes of Health, the Kentucky Senator told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Tuesday night that he is referring Fauci to the Justice Department for a criminal inquiry. From a report by the Daily Mail:
‘We have scientists that will line up by the dozens saying the research he was funding was gain of function,’ Paul told Hannity.
‘He is doing this because he has a self interest to cover his tracks and to cover his connection to Wuhan lab.
‘Now does he deserve all the blame? No, there’s still some conjecture as to whether or not it came from the lab.
‘But he is lying about whether or not he funded gain of function research, and yes, he should be punished.’
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: (Headline USA) Dr. Anthony Fauci, deferred to by Beltway Democrats and the legacy media as the nation’s top infectious disease bureaucrat, angrily confronted Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul on Tuesday in testimony on Capitol Hill, rejecting Paul’s insinuation that the U.S. helped fund research at a Chinese lab that could have sparked the COVID-19 outbreak.
Paul suggested that Fauci had lied before Congress when in May he denied that the National Institutes of Health funded so-called “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a Wuhan virology lab.
U.S. intelligence agencies are currently exploring theories that either an accidental leak or development of a biological weapon from that lab could have led to the global pandemic.
“I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied. Certainly not before Congress. Case closed,” Fauci told Paul before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
He claimed, without evidence, that a study the senator mentioned referenced a different sort of virus entirely from the one responsible for the coronavirus outbreak.
“Senator Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly,” Fauci said. “And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you’re talking about.”
He added, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.”
It was the latest in a series of clashes between Paul and Fauci over the origins of the virus that caused the global pandemic.
Adapted from reporting by Associated Press.
