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By Sen. Rand Paul
One million Americans died from COVID-19. Some estimate as many as 15 million people died worldwide from COVID-19. Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally. While privately, he was well aware of a mountain of evidence suggesting the virus originated in the lab.
The American people deserve answers. The American people deserve to know why dangerous research was funded by NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] in a totalitarian country in a lab that lacked acceptable safety standards.
The decision to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, will likely go down in history as perhaps one of the worst public health decisions. Frankly, the American people deserve an apology. I hope today Dr. Fauci will come clean, admit it was a mistake to fund dangerous research in China.
Admit that the risk of this dangerous research exceeded any possible benefits. Ask forgiveness and pledge to help our government devise safeguards so a man-made epidemic never happens again.
Instead of an apology, you have for years avoided responsibility.
Regarding the lockdowns, you argue that you did not personally issue every lockdown order, close every school or impose every mandate, but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions. And you presented your recommendations not as judgments open to debate, but as dictates of science itself.
Your own words demonstrate that you understood the influence you exercised. On March 14, 2020, you wrote that the task force recommendations were driven by me, yourself, Deb[orah Birx] and CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].
The next day you wrote that you had convinced Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the New York City schools, so you were involved.
That same night, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff told you that the governor had decided to close California schools, bars and restaurants after watching you on television. Presidents, governors, mayors, school boards, corporations and Congress all bear responsibility for the decisions they made.
The COVID lockdown, however, could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime. Children lost years of education. Small businesses built over a lifetime disappeared. Patients delayed cancer screenings and other medical care. Families were separated from dying relatives.
Workers were ordered to accept a medical procedure or lose their jobs. Worship assembly, employment, education and travel were restricted in the name of science. While you did not impose every restriction, you used your public authority to justify them.
While you concluded publicly that COVID occurred naturally, your private record tells a different story. In early 2020, your handpicked virologist warned that the virus appeared to have been manipulated in the lab. In a conference call concerning the origin of the virus, all but two of the participants believed deliberate insertion was possible.
Your concern was not merely theoretical. That same week, you led an urgent effort to determine whether your own agency had funded the research related to these experiments that were now under suspicion.
Hours later, your assistant reported that the Wuhan experiments had indeed been reviewed and approved by the NIH [National Institutes of Health]. Those were not the actions of officials who believed that a research-related origin was an absurd conspiracy theory.
They were the actions of officials urgently trying to determine whether their agency funding was connected to the research under discussion, connected to the pandemic. You could not hide that your agency had funded the Wuhan research or your long history of defending gain-of-function research.
The only alternative left was to argue that COVID-19 did not originate in the Wuhan lab. You were not a detached observer. You had an institutional interest in the public believing that federally funded research had nothing to do with the pandemic.
It was a conflict of interest from the very beginning. The authors of “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” privately had serious doubts about a natural origin.
Within days, though, they flipped, and they all wrote in “Proximal Origin” that the virus was almost certainly not a laboratory construct. That paper was then used by the government and the media and you to discredit Americans who were asking the same questions that you and the authors were asking yourselves privately.
You even cited “Proximal Origin” from the White House podium. You held it out as evidence that the virus could not have been engineered, but you didn’t disclose your role and the discussions that preceded the writing of the paper. You did not disclose the authors’ original concerns.
You did not reveal that you had been part of the paper, that you had read and offered editorial comments on the paper before it was published, before you began using it as evidence that it couldn’t have originated in the lab.
You did not disclose that you had immediately investigated yourself whether NIAID funding might be connected to the research.
You did not tell the American people the full story. Duly released private messages indicate that the doubts with the authors and others didn’t disappear after the publication.
So while this was being waved at the White House to show that it couldn’t come from the lab, the authors were still privately continuing to assign a meaningful probability to a laboratory origin, one thing in public and another in private.
Some of the same scientists discussed avoiding email and carefully managing communications that might eventually be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The pattern is straightforward. Privately, there was alarm, then an immediate inquiry to see if NIAID’s possible exposure to funding.
Then a rapid public declaration of certainty, continued private doubt and then years of resistance to disclosure. The question is why? The only logical answer is that your primary concern was avoiding culpability. Your primary concern was hiding the fact that you had approved the funding for this dangerous research.
Your supportive gain-of-function research is extensive and longstanding. In 2011, your agency funded Ron Fouchier’s laboratory when it mutated the avian flu until it could spread through the air between mammals. This was the tipping point.
This is when others became worried. You funded this. You advocated for this. The federal government’s own biosecurity board, though, recommended withholding the details of these experiments because of the danger the research posed.
People were concerned that publishing it was publishing a roadmap to creating bioweapons around the world. But you sided with the gain-of-function scientist Fouchier and argued that the benefits of publishing the research far outweighed the risks. You defended this avian flu transmissibility experiments as critical research.
You wrote that even if a scientist became infected and triggered a pandemic, the benefits of the gain-of-function experiments outweighed the risk. In 2014, your agency, NIAID, began funding the Wuhan bat coronavirus work.
In 2015, Ralph Baric and the Chinese scientist Xi Zhengli published NIAID-supported research combining a bat coronavirus spike protein with a SARS backbone. The resulting virus could infect human airway cells. It’s a novel virus that now can affect human cells. It gained transmissibility. It gained function.
In 2018, the same group of scientists, EcoHealth, Baric, Xi and their collaborators, submitted the DEFUSE proposal. DEFUSE proposal, which involved the insertion of a furin cleavage site into the coronavirus. DARPA rejected it as too dangerous.
When COVID was sequenced, though, early on in January of 2020, within days, scientists discovered that lo and behold, it had a novel furin cleavage site just as had been proposed in the DEFUSE product. This was either an extraordinary coincidence or a smoking gun, evidence that the Chinese had created COVID-19.
It made the laboratory-origin question more legitimate and it made your categorical public denials indefensible.
On May 11, 2021, you told the Senate the NIH has never ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. When I gave you the opportunity to correct the record, to reconsider the statement, you responded that you had never before lied to Congress.
We were then told that only the government’s narrowest regulation of definition counted here, that you could define gain-of-function in one way in which this wasn’t gain-of-function, in which all of the common sense of the world would be thrown out.
All of the idea that the mice were dying and the virus was more transmissible didn’t matter because you had a technical definition that allowed you to fund it. But the real question is, was it dangerous?
Was it a wise decision to fund this? And you haven’t deviated from that. You’ve never admitted that it could have been a mistake funding this research in China.
The American people weren’t asking for a semantics debate over what is gain-of-function. They were asking, does common sense say this research was dangerous in Wuhan? They wanted to know whether their money funded experiments in Wuhan that made bat coronaviruses better able to infect humans.
The answer is yes. They wanted to know whether NIAID adequately supervised their work. The answer is no. When you defended this research, you described its benefits in the broadest terms. But when Congress demanded accountability, you hid behind the narrowest possible definition. You can’t have it both ways.
Your conduct concerning federal records raises further questions. It is a crime to destroy federal records. Yet our investigation reveals your assistant diligently reported that she deleted tons of emails.
In 2024, you testified that you did not delete federal records. Who’s telling the truth? You or your assistant? The committee has obtained repeated instructions from you telling federal officials to delete communications.
On Feb. 2, 2020, one day after Origin’s call, you told Francis Collins, “Please delete this email after you read it.” The committee asked for your voluntary cooperation to come today. Your appearance had to be compelled by subpoena.
You’re here today under duress. You are here today because of the court ordering it. President Biden issued you a sweeping pardon extending back to 2014, the same pardon he gave to his son Hunter. A pardon may protect a person from criminal prosecution, doesn’t rewrite history.
It does not erase documents. It does not convert a misleading statement into a truthful one. And it does not prevent Congress from establishing what happened. There will be another pandemic. There will be another crisis. And there will again be officials who insist that uncertainty must be hidden for the public’s own good.
They will demand obedience. They will invoke science. I am the science as though it were a commandment. They will argue that government officials cannot be questioned because questioning them would undermine public trust. They have it backwards.
It is secrecy that destroys trust. It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy. Trust can’t be ordered. It has to be earned. No scientist is above scrutiny. No government official is beyond accountability.
And no public servant has the right to treat the suffering of millions of Americans as a footnote to his preferred version of history. I now recognize Sen. [Gary] Peters for his opening remarks.
Watch Sen. Paul’s opening statement here: