Anthony Fauci accused of perjury: Former White House doctor ‘LIED under oath about funding gain-of-function research in China – which is feared to have started Covid pandemic’, Republican Senator claims
Dr. Anthony Fauci was accused tonight of lying under oath about his knowledge of dangerous virus research in China – which is feared to have caused the pandemic.
DailyMail.com can reveal that Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week calling for an investigation into whether Dr. Fauci, 82, committed perjury while testifying before a Senate Judiciary Committee in 2021.
In a confrontation with Republicans, including Sen. Paul, in July of that year, Dr. Fauci that his former “never and now will not fund research on gains of function in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Dr. Fauci was a former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until the end of 2022 and was responsible for signing off on research grants.
Yet newly released emails of February 1, 2020 shows Fauci acknowledging that “Scientists at the University of Wuhan are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapt to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”
Perjury is a federal felony punishable by up to five years in prison. While the emails show that Fauci knew about the lab’s gain-of-function, he never admitted that the NIH funded it.
But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined last month that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University did receive NIH funding, Senator Paul said in his letter to AG Garland.
New emails dated February 1, 2020 show Fauci acknowledging that “scientists at Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapt to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan’
On July 13, 2023, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released the emails of Dr. Fauci on a conference call on the origins of Covid attended by Dr. Faucis, dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and other researchers.
In one email, Dr. Fauci admits that the scientists’ concerns that Covid may have been genetically engineered were exacerbated by the fact that function enhancement research was taking place in Wuhan before the pandemic.
Gain-of-function research is medical research that genetically alters a virus to make it more deadly or more contagious in order to get ahead of natural mutations that may occur.
At the July hearing, Fauci stated “that the NIH has never and is not now funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Paul said in the committee room.
‘Still, the gain-of-function research was done entirely in the Wuhan Institute by Dr. Shi [Zhengli] and was funded by the NIH,” he said.
Paul then cited the paper by WIV scientists titled ‘Discovery of a rich gene pool of SARS-related bat coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of the SARS coronavirus’.
The paper specifically talks about ongoing efforts to produce a “chimeric” coronavirus, meaning it has been modified by man – otherwise known as “gain of function.”
It also describes, Paul noted, that the NIH was a source of funding for that research.
Senator Rand Paul got into a heated argument with Dr. Anthony Fauci, when he again urged the country’s top immunologist whether the US was funding the function research in Wuhan. Fauci responded with: ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’
Paul gave Fauci the opportunity to retract his May 11 statement alleging that the US was not funding a profit-of-function study with its $600,000 grant, saying, “Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, will you withdraw your statement?’
Fauci got quite animated during the exchange, pointing fingers at Paul for being a ‘liar’
Paul pointed his pencil back, insisting that the evidence shows that funding from the National Institute of Health went to the Wuhan lab, which he claims then used that money to research how a bat coronavirus could be transmissible to humans and more contagious and can be made deadlier
Paul claimed that the research in the paper “explicitly conforms to the definition of gain-of-function research.”
“This item was rated non-functional by qualified personnel across the chain,” Fauci insisted.
But the recently released emails show that Fauci refers to the research by scientists at Wuhan University as “gain-of-function experiments.”
Dr. Shi Zhengli, also known as “bat lady,” a leading virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has spent years researching bat coronaviruses with the goal of identifying those that could potentially infect humans.
Both she and Beijing itself have vehemently and publicly denied the possibility that Covid could have originated from experiments conducted in the lab.
Dr. Zhengli graduated from Wuhan University in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in genetics and received her master’s degree from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 1990.
Last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University received NIH funding, Senator Paul said in his letter to AG Garland.
It said: “The report noted that the NIH funded the WIV project “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” and “involved genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized coronavirus strains .”
“GAO also found that NIH funded Wuhan University’s collaboration with WIV on viral detection in Yunnan province.”
DailyMail.com has contacted Fauci through the NIAID for comment.
A former head of the NIH, Fauci presided over the allocation of taxpayer-funded grants for virus-promoting research at WIV years before the pandemic began.
A federal watchdog found that the NIH “did not effectively monitor” those experiments or monitor whether they involved pathogens with pandemic risk.
But there is still no direct evidence of a natural or synthetic origin, splitting officials on the issue.
The Department of Energy, the FBI and several government commissions believe the virus leaked from a lab, pointing to a number of coincidences and circumstantial evidence.
The WIV – one of the top bat virus hubs in the world – is at the epicenter of the original Covid outbreak and suffered several security and infection control breaches before the pandemic.
The lab housed viruses thought to be Covid’s closest known relatives, and the research involved genetically engineering different strains to see how they would infect humans.
However, several other intelligence agencies claim that the virus was transmitted from animals to humans through a natural spillover.
Proponents of the natural origin point to an early cluster of cases at an animal slaughter market just eight miles from the WIV, where animals known to harbor Covid, such as raccoon dogs, hedgehogs and rats, were kept in appalling conditions.