Over 1 million people in the United States have died from COVID-19 so far, and another 9 million lost their jobs because of the pandemic. But until this week, Congress had never held a hearing on the origins of the coronavirus — instead, the Democrats in charge have held dozens of hearings, many made explicitly for television, into the Jan. 6 riot.
Fortunately, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) changed all that Wednesday when the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held Congress’s first hearing into the role that gain-of-function research most likely played in the pandemic.
“Gain-of-function research of concern involves the creation of new health threats — health threats that did not exist previously and that might not have come to exist by natural means for tens, hundreds, thousands of years,” Waksman Institute of Microbiology Director Dr. Richard Ebright testified to the committee.
Despite the clear risks that gain-of-function research creates, Ebright conceded that there are benefits as well. “I believe that enhancing oversight of the research is the more effective and more prudent strategy than simply banning it,” he said.
That oversight, however, was not present when National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci gave EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak $3.7 million to study “the risk of future coronavirus emergence” in China. From that grant, $600,000 made it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the institution many scientists now believe is the source of COVID-19.
Fauci has vehemently denied that he played any role in funding gain-of-function research in China, but Ebright strongly disagrees.
“The statements made on repeated occasions to the public, to the press, and to policymakers by Dr. Fauci have been untruthful,” Ebright said. “I do not understand why those statements are being made because they are demonstrably false.”
After the U.S. Embassy in Beijing was informed that the WIV was conducting coronavirus research in 2017, embassy officials requested a tour of the lab and were alarmed to find “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to operate this high-containment laboratory.”
Despite this warning, Fauci continued to fund EcoHealth Alliance research at the WIV. Then, when COVID-19 did spread to America, Fauci conspired with Daszak to engineer a letter in the Lancet that was designed to shut down all investigation into the WIV. Daszak would later email Fauci after one of his many television appearances, thanking him for “publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID … not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Whatever benefits gain-of-function research may have in safe and secure labs here in the U.S., those benefits are far outweighed by the risks of our government funding gain-of-function research in unsafe foreign labs, as Fauci clearly did. Congress should hold more investigations into the gain-of-function research funded by Fauci, and it should also pass a law banning the funding of gain-of-function research in foreign countries.
