Rand Paul Says “Without Question” Anthony Fauci Funded Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan

For five years the fight over Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan Institute of Virology was argued as a question of whether. Whether American money ever reached the lab. Whether the work counted as gain-of-function. Whether something brewed in a Chinese facility could have slipped its containment and circled the globe. Sen. Rand Paul has decided that question is closed. The one worth asking now is what the experiments were actually for.

Pressed on Breitbart News Daily on whether Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, steered taxpayer dollars toward gain-of-function research in Wuhan, the Kentucky Republican did not hedge. “Without question, he did,” Paul said.

The interview landed on the heels of a striking disclosure. In her closing weeks as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard released a cache of declassified communications under a heading that left nothing to the imagination: “Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Research That Sparked COVID.”

Days before that, she had unveiled evidence of long-running American funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, several of them sitting inside Ukraine while a war grinds on around them.

It is that second revelation that seems to have lodged itself in Paul’s mind. The senator is less interested in re-litigating the Wuhan question than in dragging the rest of the network into daylight.

What I specifically want to know is what exactly the experiments are, because the establishment, the defenders of Anthony Fauci, said this is just a vaccination program for brucellosis for cows.

He is not buying the cattle story.

I don’t know. It seems like there might be more there. Why are we doing this in 30 different countries? Why are we doing this in countries that have wars going on?

It is a fair question, and the establishment’s answer has always been a shrug dressed up as expertise. Labs handling dangerous pathogens are planted in unstable corners of the world, Paul notes, precisely where a military collapse or a stray missile could turn a research sample into a regional catastrophe.

The defenders insist there is nothing to see. The man who spent the pandemic being told to defer to credentials would like the credentials to explain themselves.

The Word That Does the Hiding

Most of the public debate has hung on a single phrase, and Paul understands that the phrase itself is the dodge. Fauci’s camp has long maintained the Wuhan work was not gain-of-function. Paul’s account of how that defense actually operated is worth sitting with.

That argument doesn’t hold water, because instead of stopping the experiments, he said, “Well, unless it grows 10 times more than what you expected, we won’t call it gain-of-function.” But even then it came back and grew 1,000 times more. Everything he did was to enable it.

Set aside, for a moment, whether every number survives scrutiny. The structure of the maneuver is the point. A definition was drawn narrowly enough that almost nothing could trip it, and when the research blew past even that generous line, the line was treated as a formality rather than a limit. This is how dangerous things get done with clean paperwork. Paul described the underlying work plainly: viruses that do not exist in nature, run through animal models engineered with human lungs, trained to adapt to human hosts. He called them “incredibly dangerous experiments” that “don’t have any value,” noting that no vaccine or treatment of consequence has ever come out of them.

Honesty requires the obvious caveat. American intelligence agencies have still not reached a unified conclusion on where COVID began, Fauci continues to deny wrongdoing, and the broadest claims stamped on Gabbard’s release are disputed by critics who say the documents underneath do not carry the weight of the cover page. But the load-bearing fact does not depend on any of that. The funding pipeline from Fauci’s NIAID through intermediaries to coronavirus research in Wuhan is not a conspiracy theory. It is a matter of record. The argument has only ever been about what to call it.

A Risk Worth Taking, He Wrote

The most damning material, in Paul’s telling, is not buried in a classified annex. Fauci put it in print. In a 2011 Washington Post column titled “A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking,” Fauci and two colleagues defended deliberately enhancing a deadly pathogen in the laboratory as a gamble the world should accept. Paul read the lesson back to him without mercy.

He said even if a pandemic should occur from gain-of-function research leaking out into the public, it would be worth it, because of the knowledge.

That is the sentence that should have ended a career, written years before the world had reason to test the theory. And when the theory was tested, the bill came due somewhere other than the desks of the men who placed the bet.

So I think the families of the 15 million people who died should be calling up Anthony Fauci and saying, you know what, for my family the risk wasn’t worth it. I lost my loved one to this experiment gone awry.

There is a particular arrogance in deciding, on behalf of strangers you will never meet, that their lives are an acceptable price for a discovery they never asked you to pursue. The pandemic-era priesthood demanded faith and called it science. What Gabbard’s declassification has done, whatever survives the scrutiny to come, is convert a debate that was once settled by institutional authority into one that can finally be settled by documents.

For all the burying, the verdict was never going to stay underground. The accounting may be slow, but it is coming, for nothing escapes the final reckoning. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

Fauci will not face that reckoning in a courtroom; a presidential pardon saw to the earthly portion of it. But Rand Paul’s question still hangs in the air, unanswered and unanswerable by the people who spent five years insisting there was no question to ask. What were the experiments for? The country paid for them. It is owed the truth.