Politifact hack: Sen. Rand Paul, who you have tangled with in the past, suggested that you and the NIH funded risky research that eventually down the line was connected to COVID-19? I don’t want to dwell on this for too long but I do want to give you that chance to react to his comments today.
Dr. Fauci: That’s actually preposterous. To bring something up is really not helpful. He was saying that we funded a kind of research in China that could lead to dangerous research. That’s not the case. So what he was saying was absolutely not true. It is really unfortunate that he brought that up. It really does nothing but cloud the issue of what we are trying to do. So it was just unfortunate that he said that.
Politifact hack: That has been the subject for a lot of our fact-checking on the coronavirus for the past year. There’s a lot of cloudiness around the origins of COVID-19 still. So I wanted to ask are you still confident that COVID developed naturally?
Dr. Fauci: No actually, that’s the point that I said. And I think that the real unfortunate aspect of what Senator Paul did was he was conflating research in a collaborative way with Chinese scientists which was — you’d almost have to say that if we did not do that then we’d be almost irresponsible because SARS-COVI-1 clearly originated in China… So we really had to learn a whole lot about the viruses that were there, about whether or not people were getting infected with bad viruses. So in a very minor collaboration as part of a sub-contract as part of a grant, we had a collaboration with some Chinese scientists. And what he conflated that was that we were involved in creating the virus. Which is the most ridiculous majestic leap I’ve ever heard of.
There it is.
Fauci just admitted:
** The virus may not have originated naturally — something he refuted earlier until now
** The US DID FUND Chinese research at the Wuhan Labs
** The US funded this research through NIH grants under his leadership
This was right after he accused Senator Paul of lying about this collaboration.
We now know that Senator Paul was 100% correct on his assertions during his Senate testimony.
And we now know that Dr. Anthony Fauci LIED while testifying to the senate committee. He was not under oath but the same rules apply during any senatorial testimony.
Fauci funded the Wuhan labs that leaked the COVID-19 virus and then shut down the US economy after the virus came to America.
It is hard to fathom how much damage this one man did to our country — and then lied about if for months.
And, for the record, Rand Paul brought the receipts.
Dr. Fauci claims the NIH “never” funded ‘gain of function research (the creation of superviruses). This document obtained through the freedom of information act shows that the NIH in 2014 stopped 19 ‘gain-of-function’ experiments… https://t.co/uRNqzQsUE6
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) May 18, 2021
By Jim Hoft