Rand Paul’s skewering of Anthony Fauci during a Congressional hearing earlier this week – followed by the senator’s announcement that he planned to write a letter to the DoJ asking that Fauci be investigated for lying to Congress – emerged as a major story. Even mainstream reporters like the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin asserted that Fauci hadn’t been truthful in his characterization of the NIH’s role in financing dangerous research involving bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The incident has clearly had an adverse impact on Fauci’s already tarnished reputation, and we imagine if the administration wasn’t in such a panic about the Delta variant, WaPo, CNN and NYT would be printing anonymously sourced stories about the administration’s growing frustration with Fauci and his – as Paul put it – potential “moral culpability”.
For those who haven’t been following along, here’s a quick summary: in the years before SARS-CoV-2 first started infecting people in Wuhan, the Fauci-led NIH gave grant money to an organization called EcoHealth Alliance. That group then turned around and funneled money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to help finance ‘gain-of-function’ research on bat coronaviruses. ‘Gain-of-function’ research involves manipulating viruses to make them more virulent and infectious against humans in the hopes that the scientists will deepen their understanding of how they work, and how to prevent them. However, the Obama Administration made it illegal to finance this type of research with federal dollars, lifting the ban just days before President Trump took office.
