Originally published June 19, 2023 6:00 pm PDT
Bill Gates “funds the WHO more than most countries do,” the Kentucky senator said.
QUICK FACTS:
- Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) appeared on Fox News on Sunday with Maria Batiromo to call for limitations on gain-of-function research and to criticize Bill Gates for being the singular “largest funder” of virus discovery.
- “Bill Gates is the largest funder of trying to find these viruses in remote caves and bring them to big cities,” Sen. Paul asserted.
- “So what happened in China is they went eight to 10 hours south of Wuhan, 2 to 300 feet deep into a cave, found viruses, and took them back to a city of 15 million,” he explained. “There are many, many scientists who think that Bill Gates is wrong in funding this, that our government’s wrong, that the Chinese government–that we don’t need to be searching for viruses that may never interact with man, and it’s worse than that.”
- “They bring viruses that we may never interact with. They bring them back to the lab, but then they manipulate them by combining them with other viruses to create viruses that don’t exist in nature,” he added.
- Paul then acknowledged that the effort has “largely been funded by Bill Gates, he funds the WHO more than most countries do.”
- The senator noted that he believes Bill Gates to be “well-intended,” but said he thinks the Microsoft cofounder has “inadvertently helped to create something, that the biggest danger to mankind right now is something that he has been funding. And that is finding these viruses, taking them back to the lab, and manipulating them to make them more dangerous.”
LIMITING GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH:
- “We know it came from the lab, and everybody can just admit it, but then we can move to the reform,” Paul stated. “The reform is, we shouldn’t be funding this kind of research in China, but we also shouldn’t be funding this kind of research in the United States,” referring to gain-of-function research.
- “What we need is an international consortium of countries that will voluntarily agree to restrict this,” he said. “The United States needs to restrict this. There are people estimating that, the next time this happens, the next time we have a leak from a lab, that between 5 and 50 percent of the population could die from another manmade virus.”
- Paul stated, “This is very, very serious. This is up there with nuclear arms control,” adding that “This is up there with the danger of nuclear war. But this is much more insidious, it’s harder to trace. But still, millions of people can die from a manmade virus.”
BACKGROUND:
- Former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dr. Robert Redfield and professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health Dr. Marc Siegel called for a “moratorium” on gain-of-function research.
- “We don’t think anyone should be manipulating or engineering this or any other virus,” the doctors wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill. “Instead, we think drug companies and others should work with what comes from nature. There are plenty of SARS-COV-2 subvariants around. And both Pfizer and Moderna have said they can produce new vaccines to cover emerging variants.”
- “Manipulating viruses to gauge their potential to infect or kill us is not a new problem but it remains highly problematic,” they argued.
