Rand Paul clashes with Fauci over coronavirus origins

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has clashed repeatedly with Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert and director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

During a Senate hearing Tuesday, Paul echoed right-wing disinformation that Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are somehow linked to the virus’s origins in Wuhan, China.

Paul alleged that the NIH had been sending funding to a Wuhan lab, which then “juiced up” a virus that was originally found in bats to create a super-virus that can infect human cells.

Paul pressed Fauci on the theory that the novel coronavirus was created in the Wuhan lab, and then somehow escaped, either because of an accident or because it was deliberately released.

The “lab leak” theory is not new, and there isn’t any evidence that the virus was engineered in a lab.

But in recent days, conservative media outlets such as Newsmax and influential right wing media figures including Tucker Carlson have floated the idea that the NIH and Fauci funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology in order to conduct the research that led to the creation of the novel coronavirus.

Fauci tried to shut it down. “Sen. Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely and completely incorrect,” he said. “The NIH has not ever, and does not now, fund ‘gain of function research’ in the Wuhan Institute.”

Gain of function research is a controversial form of study that involves boosting the infectivity and lethality of a pathogen. Fauci has advocated for the research in the past, but he denied that the NIH was funding it in China.

“We have not funded gain of function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No matter how many times you say it, it didn’t happen,” Fauci said.

U.S. health agencies did at one point fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the form of a grant given to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, which hired the lab to conduct genetic analyses of bat coronaviruses and examine how they spread to humans.

Even though there’s no evidence that money was used for gain of function research, or that it was illegal, or that it somehow helped cause the pandemic, that didn’t stop Paul’s line of questioning.