The National Institutes of Health has stunningly admitted to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China’s Wuhan lab — despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened. The letter revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci was wrong — and Senator Rand Paul was right.
Last month, NIH Director Francis Collins a close aid of Fauci resigned from the post amid growing controversies about funding of research and COVID pandemic.
In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, a top NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance — the New York City-based nonprofit that has funneled US funds to the Wuhan lab — for not being transparent about the work it was doing.
NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote in the letter that EcoHealth’s “limited experiment” tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” The lab mice infected with the modified virus “became sicker” than those that were given the unmodified virus, according to Tabak. “As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” Tabak said.
The admission from the NIH official directly contradicts Fauci’s testimony to Congress in May and July, when he denied the US had funded gain-of-function projects in Wuhan. Fauci has repeatedly clashed with Republican senators, including Rand Paul of Kentucky, who have accused him of lying about the gain-of-function research.
Tabak, who did not use the term gain-of-function in his letter but alluded to it, said EcoHealth — which is run by British scientist Peter Daszak — failed to comply with the terms of the grant, which required it to “report immediately a one log increase in growth.” “EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant. EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award,” Tabak said.
Tabak said if EcoHealth had alerted NIH to the growth, it would have prompted a review to determine if the research plan should be re-evaluated.
Rand Paul blasts Anthony Fauci after NIH admits gain-of-function funding. Earlier this year, Paul accused Fauci of “obfuscating the truth” and at one point asked if he wished to rescind prior remarks given that it is a felony to lie to Congress.
Paul told host Will Cain the story should not be about him, but about America’s health and national security: “Five million people died from a virus that came out of a lab — wouldn’t we want to know, wouldn’t we want to prevent this from happening again? This virus is very deadly, what if we had a virus that had a 15% mortality rate?”
“Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks,” he continued, according to the New York Post.
Paul said Fauci has been intentionally “never fully explain[ing] why the experiments are not gain-of-function. His declination is this: it’s inadvertent, we didn’t know they were going to gain function. That is what a gain of function experiment is. You don’t know when you combine two viruses that they will be more deadly but it might be if you have half a brain you know if you combine two viruses it might be more deadly.”
Paul said he and other lawmakers have already referred Fauci to the Justice Department for investigation – but noted that he is not expecting much given the inordinate resources being allocated by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.
“I don’t know if they have time to go after Dr. Fauci for lying. He should be held accountable because what we have developed as a system of health care in our country where doctors are afraid to speak out because they will cut out their research funding, doctors who have talked about innovative treatment to try to help people survive COVID are being lectured and told we will take your license. This is the kind of thing, this top-down centralization of medical authority, it’s not good for our country and it’s not good for innovation.”
Paul said he fears that an apolitical doctor will stumble across a life-saving treatment to another disease or virus – but instead discard or not publicize his work for fear of retribution from the medical establishment and people like Fauci, whose office allocates millions of dollars in grant monies.
Fauci must be arrested and prosecuted for perjury. Any reasonable adult knows whether they are lying under oath, and Fauci definitely intentionally lied under oath!, an anonymous wrote on the Fox News post.
Dr. Fauci is still the top-paid federal employee earning $434,312 in 2020. Fauci out-earned the U.S. president ($400,000); four-star generals in the military ($282,000); and roughly 4.3 million other federal employees.
As Jim Jordan and Rand Paul have said many media houses have also misrepresented the information about COVID, it is now time to scrutinize media houses if they are right or wrong and it is time to condemn the wrong ones for the sake of health of people. In this pandemic even non science people like news reporters have become scientific gods without any domain knowledge giving their views about testing, tracing, wave forecasting etc.
If no measure will be taken then this will repeat again and again, where leaders and wealthy people will move without masks independently but common people will be forced to live under lockdown with no job and money and will be forced to die without oxygen, beds and other life saving amenities.
