Coronavirus czar Dr. Anthony Fauci insisted this week that Sen. Rand Paul had slandered him during a congressional hearing. Paul had pressed Fauci about whether the National Institutes of Health funded dangerous gain-of-function research in China. However, all of the evidence suggests Paul is right, and Fauci is lying.
Fauci has been adamant that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research in China’s Wuhan lab, even swearing under oath that the agency “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” But as Paul pointed out this week, there are records proving the WIV was conducting gain-of-function research and that the funding the NIH granted to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based research organization that has long supported the WIV’s work, helped fund that research.
Paul specifically cited a 2017 scientific paper co-authored by Shi Zhengli, who was in charge of the WIV’s coronavirus research, which says Shi “took two bat coronavirus genes — spike genes — and combined them with a SARS-related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature.” And we’re to believe this doesn’t fit the definition of gain-of-function research, otherwise known as research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease?
There’s been a bit of debate among virologists over whether Shi’s work actually did make the spike genes more transmissible, which is technically what would have needed to occur for the experiment to qualify as gain-of-function. Let’s say the skeptics are right and the WIV’s experiments didn’t make the virus more deadly or transmissible than it already was. Regardless, there is no question that Shi was taking an enormous risk by creating a new chimeric virus that could have become more dangerous and transmissible than the original. How is that not a problem?
The 2017 paper also noted that Shi received funding from the NIH through EcoHealth Alliance, which has received more than $15.2 million from the NIH over the years, $3.74 million of which was directed toward bat coronavirus research. So, yes, the NIH was funding extremely questionable research in Wuhan, and Fauci’s claim otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. He likes to say the NIH only sent money to EcoHealth Alliance, as if we don’t know where that money went afterward. That connection matters, and Fauci knows it.
Fauci has claimed that he didn’t really know what was going on in the Wuhan lab, but this is almost impossible to believe. He has spent much of his career advocating for the exact kind of research Shi was performing. He continually pushed the federal government toward gain-of-function research under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. As recently as 2018, he was praising the NIH’s decision to lift its pause on the funding of gain-of-function research. This is his life’s work — of course he’s going to be defensive about it.
So, yes, it matters whether Fauci lied. He’s still operating as the face of the federal government’s coronavirus response, and he is a powerful public health official who knew the risks the Wuhan lab was taking, yet aided its researchers anyway. There’s a good chance 4 million people are dead because of that research.
