Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. scientist who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 pandemic response, is set to face off with a Republican senator probing the origins of the coronavirus. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky subpoenaed Fauci to appear before a Senate committee.
Pandemic Origins
Leading up to the hearing, Paul released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Pointing to some notes about early efforts at understanding how the virus emerged, Paul wrote on the social media platform X that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
Many scientists believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, coming to light when it spread at a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. There’s no new scientific information supporting that the virus might instead have leaked from a laboratory, a theory Paul champions.
NIH-Funded Research
Republicans also have accused Fauci of lying about whether his agency funded “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential real-world impact — at a lab in Wuhan. NIH for years gave grants to a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance that used some of the funds to work with a Chinese lab studying coronaviruses commonly carried by bats.
Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.
