The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to ban the funding of dangerous gain of function research in China. The vote passed on an amendment introduced by Senator Rand Paul and sponsored by a number of other Republicans in the chamber.
"We don’t know whether the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan or evolved naturally,” Paul said in a statement. “While many still deny funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, experts believe otherwise. The passage of my amendment ensures that this never happens in the future. No taxpayer money should have ever been used to fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and now we permanently have put it to a stop.”
SENATE: The Senate chamber erupts into cheers after an amendment proposed by @RandPaul that bans US funding of gain-of-function research in China is passed by unanimous voice vote pic.twitter.com/8fQ6hAWpuW
— Forbes (@Forbes) May 25, 2021
The victory comes shortly after Paul pressed Dr. Anthony Fauci on the National Institute of Health's funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Gain-of-function experiments, essentially, take natural viruses and manipulate them in a lab to jump to or infect humans. It is suspected this is what happened with Wuhan coronavirus, which then created a pandemic after escaping the lab.
Fauci still denies gain-of-function research was part of an NIH grant, but according scientists who depend on Fauci approving their funding, he's known as the "Godfather" of the experiments.
In an interview with Megyn Kelly Wednesday, Rogin revealed that scientists who wish to speak out on details of COVID-19 are barred from doing so since research funding comes from organizations like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which are influenced or run by Fauci.
"I often talk to scientists who say the same thing, that say, ‘Listen, we really want to speak out about this, but we can’t do it. Why can’t we do it? Well, we get all of our funding from NIH, or NIAID… which is run by Dr. Fauci,'" he said on Kelly’s podcast. "And so we can’t say anything like ‘Oh, gain-of-function research might be dangerous, or it might have come from a lab, because we’re going to lose our careers, we’re going to lose our funding, we’re not going to be able to do the work.'"
"The head of the funding, the head of the entire field, really, is Anthony Fauci," he said. "He’s the godfather of gain-of-function research as we know it. That, again, just what I said right there, is too hot for TV because people don’t want to think about the fact that our hero of the pandemic… might also have been connected to this research, which might also have been connected to the outbreak.
Meanwhile, the White House continues to defer to the World Health Organization and the Chinese Communist party for a thorough investigation about what happened.
Peter Doocy repeatedly grills White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on the WSJ story alleging three Wuhan Institute of Virology employees became so ill in Nov. 2019 that they ended up in the hospital. Doocy presses on why the Biden administration isn't pressing China harder (1/2) pic.twitter.com/cOAwLDoaER
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 24, 2021
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