Fauci and Paul, Round 2
At a July 20 Senate hearing, Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, once again had a testy exchange over whether the U.S. funded gain-of-function research in China, with each man accusing the other of “lying.”
Paul also suggested that the research was tied to “4 million people dying around the world” from COVID-19, but then backed off the implication, saying, “No one’s saying those viruses” studied in the paper in question “caused it.”
Most of the exchange was like a flashback to the clash between the two men at a May 11 Senate hearing, which we’ve written about. But the senator also made a false claim about theories on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19.
Paul said that “all the evidence is pointing that it came from the lab,” but there is no evidence linking the novel coronavirus to a lab — only speculation. As we’ve explained, many scientists with expertise in coronaviruses consider a lab escape unlikely and a natural spillover of the virus from an animal to a human, which has not yet been peer reviewed.
