Senator Rand Paul “has it in” for Fauci — said Dr. Anthony Fauci at last week’s Senate hearing.
The former director of the NIAID and former Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden made it sound like the Kentucky senator was trying to put him in prison. But what Dr. Paul asked of Dr. Fauci was an apology — not jail-time.
Why, though?
“If we don’t want this to happen again, him acknowledging that he was wrong to fund this research will be a word of caution and warning to the next generation of people to come through,” the senator told Mark Halperin. “And the debate will have ultimately been won on ‘gain of function.’
“The danger of it.”
The point, Rand Paul says, is to stop the madness of this type of research.
Earlier in the interview he had noted that scientists had warned that the results at the Wuhan Institute of Virology should not be published. It would be a blueprint, or recipe, for a never-ending biological warfare by terrorists.
The whole interview is worth listening to. Mark Halperin does what so few journalists do when confronting a contentious issue: formulate each question in epistemically sound terms, for clarity. “Is that an established fact in your mind, or do you need to know more?”
Here are some responses from Sen. Paul:
- Fauci was a long-time supporter and financer of gain-of-function research: fact.
- Fauci “was aware that they [the Wuhan researchers] were doing gain-of-function research” but Fauci would quibble over semantics, about the exactitudes of what qualifies as such: fact. (Fauci’s being evasive.)
- Fauci funded that research: “without question” a fact.
- Fauci lied about the wet market origin theory: fact.
There’s more. Let’s praise a journalist for asking clear questions and a politician for giving clear answers.
Especially about the coronavirus origin.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Fauci’s the Focal Point”
Are you certain? “ The “Gain-of-Function” Debate: Critics, including several U.S. lawmakers, have argued that certain experiments involving bat coronaviruses constituted “gain-of-function” research—meaning pathogens were modified to increase their transmissibility or lethality.
Official Stance: NIH and NIAID officials have maintained that the work funded did not meet the technical definition of gain-of-function research under federal guidelines at the time, because the viruses being studied were genetically distinct from SARS-CoV-2 and could not have evolved into the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Pam, Fauci’s own diary referred to that work as gain-of-function; and he began supporting such research outside of America after an order from President Obama to end support for gain-of-function research brought it to an end in America.