Rand Paul to Newsmax: No Response From NIH, HHS on COVID Information

Republican senators have not gotten a response yet to their letter to Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) demanding documents concerning their handling of the coronavirus pandemic following the release of a trove of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails, Sen. Rand Paul tells Newsmax.

“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 told 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.'”

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,” said Paul.

He said he’s asked the chairperson of the Homeland Security and the Health committees to investigate the situation.

“We should want to know the origin of this and we should want to try to prevent this from ever happening again,” said Paul. “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.”

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