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'He is egregiously incorrect': Fauci fires back at Rand Paul for claiming the NIH changed gain-of-function definition on their website and now he's 'trying to cover his a**'

  During a heated   Senate   debate Dr.   Anthony Fauci   called Sen.   Rand Paul   'egregiously wrong' after the senator said Fauci...

 During a heated Senate debate Dr. Anthony Fauci called Sen. Rand Paul 'egregiously wrong' after the senator said Fauci refused to take responsibility for the pandemic and accused him of scrubbing the definition of 'gain-of-function' from the NIH website. 

'You have said I am unwilling to take any responsibility for the current pandemic. I have no responsibility for the current pandemic,' the NIAID director said. 

'I don't expect you to admit today that you approved of gain-of-function research in Wuhan but your repeated denials have worn thin and a majority of Americans frankly don't believe you,' the Kentucky Republican told Fauci.  

'This was risky type of research,' he said. 'It was risky to share this with the Chinese and Covid may have been created from a not yet revealed virus.' 

Paul has repeatedly accused Fauci of misleading the public about  the NIH's grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn distributed nearly $600,000 of that funding to its collaborator, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). He says that WIV could likely enhanced a pathogen that spilled out and led to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

A Wednesday report from The Intercept found that NIH officials collaborated with EcoHealth to help them evade restrictions on coronavirus research.  

But the senator freshly accused Fauci of scrubbing the term 'gain-of-function' from the NIH website to fit his narrative that the NIH didn't fund such research.  

'We're aware that you deleted the gain-of-function definition from the NIH website,' Paul said.    

'You have said I am unwilling to take any responsibility for the current pandemic. I have no responsibility for the current pandemic,' the NIAID director said

'You have said I am unwilling to take any responsibility for the current pandemic. I have no responsibility for the current pandemic,' the NIAID director said

'Until you accept responsibility we're not going to get anywhere close to trying to prevent another lab leak with this dangerous sort of experiment. You won't admit that it's dangerous and for that lack of judgment, I think it's time that you resign,' said Paul

'Until you accept responsibility we're not going to get anywhere close to trying to prevent another lab leak with this dangerous sort of experiment. You won't admit that it's dangerous and for that lack of judgment, I think it's time that you resign,' said Paul

'The preponderance of evidence points toward this coming from a lab and what you have done is change the definition on your website to cover your ass basically. That's what you've done. You've changed the website to try to change the definition so it doesn't include the risky research that is going on,' he said. 

'Until you accept responsibility we're not going to get anywhere close to trying to prevent another lab leak with this dangerous sort of experiment. You won't admit that it's dangerous and for that lack of judgment, I think it's time that you resign,' said Paul. 

'It makes me very uncomfortable to have to say something but he is egregiously incorrect in what he says,' Fauci said. 

'History will figure that out on its own,' Paul interjected. 

'You said the overwhelming amount of evidence indicates that it's  a lab leak,' Fauci continued. 'I believe ... most virologists would disagree with you. That it is much more likely, even though we leave open all possibilities, it is much more likely this was a natural occurrence.'

Prior to Oct. 20, as Paul points out, the NIH website said that gain-of-function research 'describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent.' 

The definition appeared under the title 'Gain-of-Function Research Involving Potential Pandemic Pathogens.' 

'The subset of GOF research that is anticipated to enhance the transmissibility and/or virulence of potential pandemic pathogens, which are likely to make them more dangerous to humans, has been the subject of substantial scrutiny and deliberation,' the website previously said. 

But on Oct. 20, the day the NIH admitted that the Wuhan lab did alter viruses to make them more transmissible or more lethal, the term 'gain-of-function' was removed from the website term list, Paul pointed out. 

That page is now titled, 'Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens.'

'He is incorrect': Fauci fires back at Rand Paul
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But on Oct. 20, the day the NIH admitted that the Wuhan lab did alter viruses to make them more transmissible or more lethal, the term 'gain-of-function' was removed from the website term list, Paul pointed out

But on Oct. 20, the day the NIH admitted that the Wuhan lab did alter viruses to make them more transmissible or more lethal, the term 'gain-of-function' was removed from the website term list, Paul pointed out

'On limited occasions, when justified by compelling public health need and conducted in very high biosecurity laboratories, NIH has supported certain research that may be reasonably anticipated to create, transfer or use potential pandemic pathogens resulting from the enhancement of a pathogen’s transmissibility and/or virulence in humans,' the website says.  

The Obama administration instituted a moratorium on federal funding of the controversial research, but the NIH lifted that ban in 2017. 

A search of the term on the NIH website still pulls up external links on the research, such as a report entitled, 'Gain-of-Function Research: Ethical Analysis.'    

That same day, Oct. 20, the NIH admitted to funding research on bat coronaviruses, to test different spike proteins, in the Wuhan lab that is at the center of COVID-19 origin theories.

It comes after Fauci testified on multiple occasions before Congress than U.S. taxpayers never financed so called 'gain-of-function research.'  

The revelation came in a letter sent to Kentucky congressman James Comer, in which NIH's principal deputy director Lawrence A. Tabak refers to a 'limited experiment' conducted to test whether 'spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model,' at the Wuhan lab.

According to Tabak, the mice infected with the modified bat virus 'became sicker' than those infected with the unmodified bat virus, according to unpublished data.

He wrote that the finding was an 'unexpected result of the research,' and that the viruses studied were 'genetically very distant' from the one that causes COVID-19.

The result is a tussle over how to define 'gain-of-function.'

While never using the term, Tabak essentially confirms that gain-of-function research, which looks at both transmitting disease between animals and humans and is a way for scientists to alter organisms and diseases to study how they could become deadlier or more transmissible, took place at the Chinese lab despite consistent denials from Dr. Fauci.

The letter shifts the blame to U.S non profit EcoHealth Alliance, which used NIH money to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for not being transparent about the kind of research they were doing.

 'EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant,' Tabak wrote in his letter. 'EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award.'  

In May, Fauci testified that the NIH 'has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.'

However, Fauci also said during that hearing that there was no way to know if Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lied and conducted gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses using U.S. tax dollars.

'There's no way of guaranteeing that,' Fauci said at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, responding to a question from Republican Sen. John Kennedy.


'But in our experience with grantees, including Chinese grantees, which we have had interactions with for a very long period of time - they are very competent, trustworthy scientists,' Fauci testified.   

In September, The Intercept revealed it had received 900 pages of documents detailing the work of EcoHealth Alliance's research in Wuhan, China.

In its first report on the documents, The Intercept highlighted two previously unreported EcoHealth Alliance grant requests that were funded by the NIH.

One of the grants included $599,000 to go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to 'identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans,' The Intercept said.

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, told The Intercept that the documents suggest researchers were creating novel coronaviruses in Wuhan.

'The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,' Ebright told The Intercept after reviewing the documents.

He said the documents showed that two different types of novel coronaviruses were able to infect humanized mice.

'While they were working on SARS-related coronavirus, they were carrying out a parallel project at the same time on MERS-related coronavirus,' he said.

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