Rand Paul & top Republicans demand Fauci’s firing as new docs show agency funded risky Covid studies in China
RT | September 8, 2021
Top White House Covid adviser Anthony Fauci is facing calls to resign after newly released documents suggested his agency funded dangerous “gain-of-function” research in China, despite previous denials.
Demands for the health adviser’s firing come after the Intercept obtained more than 900 pages of material related to coronavirus research funded by Fauci’s agency – the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) – including previously unpublished grant requests from a US-based org that passed federal funds to the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who has repeatedly sparred with Fauci throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, touted the document dump in a Tuesday tweet, saying the materials “make it abundantly clear that [Fauci] needs to be held accountable,” noting he had already asked the Justice Department to review the adviser for “lying” in previous congressional testimony.
The documents published by the Intercept show that the US-based organization, the EcoHealth Alliance, was granted some $3.1 million in funding approved by Fauci’s NIAID – later increased to exceed $3.7 million in total, according to other government records. Of that grant, $599,000 was funneled to the WIV, specifically to fund work to “identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans,” according to the Intercept.
The firm’s grant application acknowledged potential dangers posed by the project, noting that “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs [coronaviruses] while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”
The EcoHealth Alliance’s joint research with the WIV has raised other questions about potentially unsafe work at the Wuhan lab, and whether ‘gain-of-function’ research – which aims to increase the virulence and infectiousness of pathogens to better study them – was carried out there. The research was considered so risky that the government imposed a halt on federal funding in 2014, though that has since been lifted.
Fauci has repeatedly denied that his agency funded, directly or indirectly, any gain-of-function work at the WIV, including in high-profile confrontations with lawmakers such as Senator Paul.
However, according to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who spoke to the Intercept after reviewing the documents, the research funded by EcoHealth included work to engineer novel viruses and test “their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell.”
In a lengthy Twitter thread posted following the Intercept story, Ebright went on to argue that the WIV work indeed constituted “gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies,” and that Fauci and other top health officials have lied to the public about it.
“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”
The revelations have prompted a number of Republican critics to demand Fauci’s resignation, or even his outright firing, while some called for further investigation into his ties to research at the WIV.
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