Fauci Facing Backlash For Lying About Support of ‘Gain-of-Function’ Research

Amid the search for the origins of COVID-19, two of the Biden administration’s top doctors, Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci, are adamant the National Institutes of Health did not fund so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But both men, the respective leaders of the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also admit they don’t actually know what the secretive Chinese lab at the center of COVID speculation has been up to.

On Tuesday, during a heated exchange with Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, Fauci denied that NIH had funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Paul pointed to NIH grants going to Peter Daszak’s New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which then provided some of that funding to the Wuhan lab, which a Trump State Department fact sheet contended carried out secretive gain-of-function experiments and worked with China’s military.

Gain-of-function research is defined by the Department of Health and Human Services as research “that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease" in an effort to "enable assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents." It warns that these studies “may entail biosafety and biosecurity risks.”

EcoHealth Alliance has received at least $3.7 million from 2014 to 2020, and Daszak, a member of a controversial WHO-China study team into the origins of COVID-19, steered at least $600,000 in NIH funding to the Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research.

Daszak criticized the United States for appearing skeptical of the WHO’s findings and defended China to Communist Party-linked outlets. U.S. Embassy officials in China raised concerns in 2018 about lax biosecurity at the Wuhan lab led by Shi Zhengli, dubbed “bat lady,” who worked closely with Daszak.

Paul asked if Fauci still supported sending money to the Wuhan lab, to which the Biden health adviser replied: “We do not send money now to the Wuhan virology institute.”

When pressed again, Fauci said: “The SARS-CoV-1 originated in bats in China. It would’ve been irresponsible of us if we did not investigate the bat viruses and serology to see who might have been infected in China.”

Paul also asked Fauci: “Will you in front of this group categorically say that COVID-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory?”

Fauci said: “I do not have an accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I am fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again — the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

A State Department fact sheet released in mid-January contended Wuhan lab researchers “conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)” and that the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.”

Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, and both administrations cast doubt on the manner in which the WHO-China study was conducted earlier this year. Though the WHO-China report said a jump from animals to humans was most likely, Trump officials pointed to an accidental escape from the Wuhan lab as a highly plausible origin for the pandemic.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, said in March that the joint WHO-China team had not fully investigated the potential of COVID-19 originating through an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab.

Shi denied her lab has been conducting research with the Chinese military during an online presentation for Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in March. During the presentation, she thanked Daszak and NIH.

During the early days of COVID-19, Shi told Scientific American that she originally asked herself, “Could they have come from our lab?” But she later told Chinese state television, “there could not possibly have been a lab leak.”

Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO group that investigated the coronavirus's origins, said in late February that “we don’t really have hard facts or detailed data on the work done” at the Wuhan lab.

Paul also pointed to Dr. Ralph Baric at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill allegedly “collaborating” with Shi on experiments related to the original SARS virus years ago.

Paul asked: “Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?”

Fauci replied: “With all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect — that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

He added: “Dr. Baric is not doing gain-of-function research, and if it is, it is according to the guidelines, and it is being conducted in North Carolina, not in China.”

Paul then argued, “At least two scientists have signed a statement from the Cambridge Working Group saying that it is gain-of-function.”

Mark Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist, tweeted in response: “I and many other Cambridge Working Group support proper investigation of SARS-CoV-2 origins including the lab leak hypothesis and continue to oppose many forms of GOF research, but it is just fabrication to say we have made any statement as a group about work in Wuhan.”

An article in Nature Medicine published in 2015 following a study by Baric, Shi, and others discussed studies on Chinese horseshoe bat populations and said, "We generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014.” The scientists said that “our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.”

An “editor’s note” added to the article in March 2020 claimed, “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered.”

Baric was among the many scientists who signed a letter in Science magazine this week arguing that “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable."

Paul contended that Fauci was “allowing super viruses to be created.”

“I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from, but again, we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci said.

The proof of Fauci's dishonesty is clear at this point.

As discontent with top Biden health officials among many in and out of the GOP grows, a group of House Republicans will introduce a bill Wednesday to effectively fire top U.S. epidemiologist Anthony Fauci.

Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, is behind the bill officially titled the Fauci's Incompetence Requires Early Dismissal (FIRED) Act. Fox News first obtained the bill ahead of its introduction Wednesday. Its co-sponsors include Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas, Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and Ralph Norman, R-S.C.

"Few people have earned their termination more visibly," Davidson said in a statement to Fox News. "His excessively long tenure is emblematic of Eisenhower's farewell address caution against scientific-technical elite steering the country for their own ends -- at odds with truth and the national interest."

The bill would impose a retroactive 12-year term limit on the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci's official post. The top scientist has held the job since 1984, so if the bill were to be signed into law he would be forced out of his job.

Of course, Davidson's bill almost certainly has no chance of being signed into law. Even if Democrats in Congress were to support it and it made it through the House and Senate -- a prospect that is beyond remote -- President Biden would presumably veto it.

Biden's White House has defended Fauci and its other medical experts and their elevated role in the administration. Counselor to the President Jeff Zients, when the administration recommended a pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, said the White House is letting "science agencies to lead with science" because political White House officials "bring nothing to the table."

But Davidson's bill reflects a broader frustration growing with Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other Biden administration health officials not just in Trumpy corners of the GOP but also among moderate Republicans and the media.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, one of the most moderate Republicans in Congress, tore into CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Tuesday during a hearing, saying that she's lost respect for the agency.

"I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance from the CDC. I always considered the CDC to be the gold standard. I don’t anymore," Collins said. "The conflicting, confusing guidance from your agency has undermined public confidence and contradicts the scientific guidance of many experts."

The left continues to falsely prop itself up as the party of science and truth.

The last week has proven one thing without a shadow of a doubt:

Democrats lie as much as Fauci does.