The next pandemic will “very likely” come from China as the country continues to conduct risky virus tampering tests, a top senator has said.
DailyMail.com revealed this week that Chinese virus hunters have been tinkering with new pathogens that have a ‘high probability’ of infecting people, despite concerns that similar experiments have led to the Covid outbreak.
In an exclusive interview with this website, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, said: ‘It’s worrying that they (China) keep doing it, it’s incredibly dangerous.’
On the risk that such research would cause a new pandemic, Senator Paul said “that’s very likely,” adding that “it wouldn’t be the first time” – a reference to the “lab leak” theory of the origins of Covid.
Sen. Paul — a former presidential candidate — believes Covid emerged from gain-of-function research funded by the American taxpayer through Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former office, a theory the FBI and other government agencies now endorse.
Senator Rand Paul got into a heated exchange with Dr. Anthony Fauci during a hearing in July 2021, when he again pressed the nation’s top immunologist about whether the US was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Fauci responded: ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’
But early in the pandemic, supporters of lab leaks were branded “conspiracy theorists” and accused of being xenophobic.
Senator Paul told DailyMail.com: ‘I think the veneer has broken down over time and I think as more and more evidence comes out and people realize that every other time we’ve had a spread of animals ( to humans), they can find an animal reservoir.
“This time they could never find (an animal reservoir) and looked at 80,000 animals in China but never found it.
‘Then a lot of the scientific analysis of the virus emerged and I think the debate shifted.
“But it’s still remarkable to me — not only that Biden is slow to defund Wuhan, or no longer fund it — we haven’t had a single hearing in the Senate yet.
“There really hasn’t been a willing partner or a curious Democrat to say, ‘Hey, maybe this came out of the lab and it could happen again. So we have to do something about it.’
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese laboratory believed to be the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, has not received any US money since 2020.
However, it has taken the Biden administration three years to propose officially suspending funding, despite numerous reports that money was being sent abroad for dangerous research with very little oversight.
It is estimated that the US has spent $100 million funding research in China over the past decade.
Senator Paul is also calling on Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to be prosecuted, saying he amounted to lying under oath.
The Kentucky lawmaker was thrust into the spotlight of the Covid pandemic debate after his infamous spat with Dr. Fauci over whether the doctor knew dangerous experiments were underway in Wuhan.
They found eight new viruses, including one that belonged to the same family as Covid
Between 2015 and 2023, at least seven U.S. entities provided NIH grant money to laboratories in China that conduct animal testing, totaling $3,306,061
The ex-White House physician said at the time that his former department “has never and has not funded any gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Gain-of-function research is medical research that genetically alters a virus to make it more deadly or contagious, in an effort to pre-empt the natural mutations that can occur.
But emails released in July, dated February 1, 2020, show that Dr. Fauci acknowledged that “scientists at Wuhan University are known to have worked on ‘gain-of-function’ experiments to determine to propose that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infections, and that the outbreak emerged. in Wuhan.’
Although the emails show that Dr. Fauci was aware of gain-of-function research in the laboratory, he never admitted that the NIH funded it.
As a former director, Dr. Fauci was responsible for signing off on such research grants.
However, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined in June that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University did receive NIH funding, Senator Paul said in a July letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In the letter, the senator called for an investigation into whether Dr. Fauci lied under oath when he testified before a Senate committee in 2021.
Lying under oath is a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison. Earlier this month, Senator Paul said that Dr. Fauci “without a doubt” belongs in prison.
Shi Zhengli – dubbed the ‘Bat Lady’ or ‘Bat Woman’ for her work on bat coronaviruses – explored the possibility that Covid could have emerged from her lab in 2020, according to colleagues
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese laboratory believed to be the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, has not received any US money since 2020. However, it has taken the Biden administration three years to propose officially suspending funding
Senator Paul told DailyMail.com: “It’s very difficult when you have an attorney general who is very partisan, like Merrick Garland.
“I think he’s probably one of the most partisan attorneys general we’ve had and I don’t expect him to prosecute Anthony Fauci, but I think it’s important when someone commits a crime that you summarize the crime, show evidence and proof of this and forward it for prosecution.
“It’s important to the public eye that we have a debate about Anthony Fauci’s dishonesty because I think this kind of research (gain-of-function) poses a great danger to us in the future if we don’t address it . .’
It is this lack of clarity and cooperation that prompted the senator to write his book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up, in which he provides evidence that Covid was likely the result of gain-of-function research in China and that Dr. Fauci knew about the origins of the virus from day one and tried to cover it up.
Now Senator Paul told DailyMail.com he would like to see something resembling an international treaty or scientific committee that would oversee and regulate potentially dangerous research into viruses, but he did not want to ban the research altogether.
“I think there’s a lot of research where it’s complicated and you’d want scientists to help with that,” Senator Paul said.
The legislation he is working on would create a committee of scientists from different disciplines to review each individual research project. Although a similar group existed in 2017, Senator Paul said it reviewed only a handful of projects presented to her by the Trump administration.
However, the government conducted dozens of gain-of-function studies. This, the senator said, is “one of our big complaints with Anthony Fauci.”
Senator Paul told DailyMail.com that he believes Dr. Fauci exempted the Wuhan investigation from committee review.
He added: “The fact that it has never been reviewed, I think, is in itself a crime and, at the very least, poor judgment.”
The senator said that Dr. Fauci has failed to provide documents proving the Chinese experiments have been reviewed and trying to get information from federal health agencies has been troubling.
Senator Paul added: ‘This is what has created the aura of this massive cover-up. I believe the cover-up extends to eight different agencies and hundreds of people.
“All these different people involved in this conspiracy know that they have funded dangerous research in China. And now they’re trying to hide it because they know the blame for the pandemic was on them.
“So some of them may not know each other… but there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people in our government who were involved in funding this investigation over time, and they’re all now trying to cover their tracks .’