Fauci skewers critic on origin of coronavirus
Top US expert trades barbs with GOP senator making research accusations
Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious diseases specialist, has once again locked horns with an outspoken US senator on the COVID-19 pandemic, with Fauci saying his conservative adversary didn’t know what he was talking about in accusations relating to the origin of the virus.
Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was doing battle with Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, in a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
Fauci and the senator, who is an ophthalmologist, clashed over what is called gain-of-function research, in which a virus can be enhanced in a laboratory to study its transmissibility, and how such findings could be used to produce future vaccines.
During their shouting match, Paul accused Fauci of having the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, where Fauci is a physician, fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Two top scientists had earlier said this kind of research did not occur at the lab.
Paul also said that Fauci lied to Congress, and later on Tuesday said in an interview that he would write to the US Department of Justice seeking a criminal referral against the chief White House medical adviser.
“Dr Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?” Paul asked in the hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, as he cited a 2017 research report about the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, virus.
Fauci replied: “This paper you’re referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function . ... Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially. If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.
“If you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments, that were given in the annual reports, that were published in the literature, it is molecularly impossible” that they resulted in SARS-CoV-2, said Fauci, who advises US President Joe Biden.
Paul countered: “Nobody is saying that those viruses caused the pandemic.” He added that his question was about the research.
NIH Director Francis Collins, in a statement earlier this year, said: “Neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”
In an interview with The New York Times in June, Shi Zhengli, a top virologist at the Wuhan institute, again denied that she had conducted any gain-of-function research on the virus.
“My lab has never conducted or cooperated in conducting gain-offunction experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses,” she told the newspaper. “This is no longer a question of science. It is speculation rooted in utter distrust.”
Virologist Danielle Anderson, who worked at the Wuhan institute’s Biosafety Level 4 Laboratory until November 2019, said in an interview last month with Bloomberg that she believes the novel coronavirus “was a natural acquired infection at some point somewhere”.
Anderson, an Australian who was the only foreigner to work at the lab, said that because it took researchers almost a decade to pin down where in nature the SARS pathogen emerged, she was not surprised that the “smoking gun” bat responsible for the COVID-19 outbreak hasn’t been discovered yet.