Rand Paul Says GOP Senators Still Have Not Received Response To Letter From HHS, NIH

Michael Cantrell   |  

Jun 16, 2021

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According to Republican Sen. Rand Paul, GOP senators have yet to receive a response to their letter to Health and Human Services and the National Institute of Health in which they demanded documents concerning how these agencies handled the coronavirus pandemic after the release of a batch of emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“They haven’t honored the request yet, but our concern is that they’re saying different things in private than they are saying in public,” the Kentucky senator said during a conversation with Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tuesday night. “So it looks like in private they have had an exchange of very urgent emails saying, ‘oh, my goodness, it looks like they were doing gain of function research’…but in public they were saying ‘nothing to see here. There’s no chance that this came from the (Wuhan) lab.'”

via Newsmax:

Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) is still saying that the NIH didn’t fund gain of function research, or the potential to enhance diseases to make them more contagious, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said Paul.

“But there’s a host of scientists in this field of research who look at the applications for the NIH money that went to the Wuhan lab and they say without question what they were doing, there was gain of function research, so we should get to the bottom of this,” the senator stated.

Paul then said he asked the chairperson of the Homeland Security and the Health committees to start looking into the situation.

“We should want to know the origin of this and we should want to try to prevent this from ever happening again,” he continued, adding, “We have to have a debate in our country. Do we want to fund research that enhances the ability of animal viruses to infect humans?”

For example, he said, if the SARS virus “that they’ve been experimenting with” gets out, that is a “15% mortality. That’s 15 times greater than what we’ve just seen this last year of COVID.”

Paul also said he thinks it’s dangerous to have a “group think,” such as seen during the pandemic, that only allows certain debate to be heard, “and if you’re opposed to a certain issue or have a different point of view, that you’re sort of the deplorable set, you’re sort of this group of people that’s so unacceptable that you won’t even be heard.”

This stuff all started with “climate alarmism,” Paul said during his interview on Newsmax. “You have to realize one of the reasons there’s a consensus in climate alarmism is it’s all funded by the government. Most of the research that we’re talking about, this virus research, is also funded by the government, so people are deathly afraid that Dr. Fauci could be vindictive or the NIH could be vindictive. Many of these people you know, will not talk in public because they’re afraid of having their funding cut off because they depend on government funding. ”

The Kentucky senator then explained that the creation of vaccines can be accomplished without gain of function research because the RNA or DNA from a virus can be sequenced in just a matter of days.

“I think we’re actually in a good position where we can make the strong argument that we don’t need to be creating, really, really pathogenic, dangerous plague-like viruses in the lab and then hoping they don’t get out,” Paul stated.

Meanwhile, matters have changed “quite a bit” where Fauci is concerned, because before “he had a sort of Teflon” where nobody questioned him. However, “it’s come out that he was really trying to suppress the story of gain of function (research)” at the Wuhan lab or the NIH’s funding for the facility.

“He continues to discount the idea of natural immunity,” he continued, adding, “More than 100 million people in our country have gotten the disease naturally. That natural immunity added up with the vaccination allows us to be at herd immunity now and the cases dwindling to nothing. And yet, Dr. Fauci insists we are not anywhere close and that we must vaccinate all the children…for children, they’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to die from COVID. It is not a disease that kills children. Very, very rarely, does it harm children.”