A columnist for the Washington Post admitted on Tuesday that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was correct in Tuesday’s heated back and forth between the senator and Dr. Anthony Fauci over the White House chief medical adviser’s denial of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Hey guys, @RandPaul was right and Fauci was wrong. The NIH was funding gain of function research in Wuhan but NIH pretended it didn't meet their "gain of function" definition to avoid their own oversight mechanism. SorryNotSorry if that doesn't fit your favorite narrative.
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) July 20, 2021
Indeed, in May, Fauci admitted the NIH funded the Wuhan lab but denied gain-of-function research despite describing it as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans” — as detailed in the paper Paul cited during Tuesday’s hearing.
According to the Daily Caller News Foundation, the “NIH subagency that awarded the grant to the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance to study Chinese bat coronaviruses opted against” running the grant through the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) committee, essentially sidestepping the safeguards for such research.
h/t DeploraVision