EXCLUSIVE — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview that he plans to use his new leadership position on a key Senate national security committee to hold accountable Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for his actions at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic almost five years ago.
Paul, the incoming chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said his plan is to start with a sweep of subpoenas for documents that drill into the origins of the virus and the degree to which Fauci and others at the National Institutes of Health were involved in funding possibly dangerous viral research in China.
Even though President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees to the NIH and several other federal public health agencies share Paul’s enthusiasm for reform, Paul said he intends to use the subpoena power to elicit details from career government employee scientists who have been resisting congressional oversight of pandemic-era decisions.
“They have resisted for three years, and I’m not going to wait around another year to see if they start responding,” Paul told the Washington Examiner.
Paul and Fauci have sparred repeatedly since the start of the pandemic, especially in 2021, when the pair, during a hearing, engaged in a yelling match over whether the then-NIAID director signed off on possibly illegal risky virology research, using the term “gain-of-function.”
In the high-profile hearing, Paul questioned Fauci as to whether NIAID violated a federal ban on federal funding of gain-of-function by financing genetic experimentation on bat coronaviruses between 2014 and 2020, conducted through the organization EcoHealth Alliance at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Obama administration briefly placed a federal moratorium on all gain-of-function research of concern from 2014 to 2017 out of fears that the practice could create a large-scale public health crisis, not unlike the COVID-19 pandemic that would hit at the end of the decade.
Fauci vehemently denied Paul’s accusations. The squabble between the two may have been based on the meaning of “gain-of-function.”
Gain-of-function is the genetic manipulation of a pathogen by making it either more infectious to humans or giving it new capabilities to cause different symptoms. The technical definition, however, stipulates that the experiments be done on pathogens that are already “likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations,” according to the NIH.
In other words, Fauci’s answer, that the agency did not fund gain-of-function research, was premised on the understanding that such research was done on pathogens already capable of spreading among humans. But Paul was asking about whether it funded any research on boosting pathogens, whether or not they were already circulating among humans.
Three years after the heated Senate exchange between the two men, Fauci told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a transcribed interview that he was using the “operative definition” of gain-of-function, while Paul was using the general term.
Legal counsel for Fauci did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment on Paul’s plans or about the storied conflict between the pair.
Paul said his ultimate goal with the investigation is to find out what happened behind closed doors to obscure the nature of the U.S.-funded research in Wuhan.
“What I’m looking for now is the actual deliberations, the paperwork, the discussion over whether or not it was or was not gain-of-function. I think there is something to be had there,” Paul said. “I don’t think they would have resisted me for three years if they actually didn’t have something to hide. It wouldn’t make sense.”
Paul said he also wants to know why the project never went before the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight, or P3CO, committee, which was established in 2017 to review risky research projects before they received federal funding.
Unfortunately, Paul said, the P3CO committee can only oversee a project if it is referred for review by leaders at the NIH, including Fauci.
“They made the decision that the Wuhan research was not gain-of-function, so it never went before the safety committee,” Paul said. “But in the end, we have now the FBI, Department of Energy, myself, many members of Congress and many scientists believing that the evidence points towards this virus coming from the lab.”
The House COVID subcommittee concluded in its final report published this month that it is plausible the virus could have resulted from an accident at the Wuhan lab.
In part as a result of the subcommittee’s work, EcoHealth Alliance was barred from receiving any federal funding for research projects after investigations revealed that the scientists broke the terms of the grant agreement for the project in Wuhan.
The subcommittee, however, was unable to uncover direct evidence proving definitively that the COVID-19 originated from the lab or that there was U.S. funding involved in its creation.
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Paul wants to pick up where the House left off. How long such an investigation will take remains unclear, but the new chairman said the first step is gathering as much documentation as possible.
“We’re going to pursue it with subpoenas,” Paul said. “We will ultimately have hearings, but we’re going to start out by just getting the information and reading it all.”