Republicans will investigate Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief White House medical adviser, if they take the Senate back in the midterm elections and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) becomes chairman of the Senate Health Committee, the lawmaker said during an interview with podcast host Lisa Boothe.
“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records,” Paul said. Notably, outgoing Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) currently sits as the ranking member of the committee.
“We’ll have an investigator go through this piece-by-piece because we don’t need this to happen again,” Paul vowed.
The two have had a series of clashes — one in July, specifically, over Fauci’s prior claim that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) never funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci, however, maintained gain-of-function research did not occur:
“This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals is gain of function. They took animal viruses that only occur in animals and they increase their transmissibility to humans. How you can say that is not gain of function?” Paul asked.
“It is not,” Fauci said as Paul continued.
“It’s a dance, and you’re dancing around this because you’re trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world from a pandemic,” Paul added.
Last month, following another round with Fauci at a Senate hearing, Paul referred to Fauci as a “Democrat partisan” who continues to try to “deflect”:
When he says it, he’s trying to deflect because what I was asking him about is this: He says that he is science and that if you question him or oppose him, you’re opposing science. But this kind of arrogance also led him and Dr. Collins to say they would take a take-down of three epidemiologists who started the Great Barrington Declaration. They’re from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard. They called them fringe. They orchestrated a take-down campaign in the lay media, not in the scientific journals on the merits, but in the lay media.
“And so, he didn’t want to answer my questions, so he accuses me of fomenting violence,” Paul continued.
“But it’s a misdirection because he doesn’t want to accept that basically, he has become a political animal and that everything he does every day is to further his political agenda, not the science,” he added.
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