Rand Paul: History Will Judge Dr. Fauci ‘Harshly’

ROBERTS: “This is something you’ve been concerned about for a long time. I want to flash back four years to this particularly tense exchange that you had with the then director of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

[Clip starts]

Paul: “You’re fooling with Mother Nature here. You’re allowing super viruses to be created with a 15 percent mortality. It’s very dangerous and it was a huge mistake to share this with China and it’s a huge mistake to allow this to continue in the United States.”

Fauci: “Again, we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No matter how many times —“

Paul: “You’re parsing words. You’re parsing words.”

Fauci: “— you say it, it didn’t happen.”

Paul: “There was research —“

[Clip ends]

ROBERTS: “You have said that Fauci should go to prison over his dishonesty regarding the Covid-19 virus and the gain-of-function research, but, Senator, he is now protected by a preemptive presidential pardon.”

Paul: “History is going to judge him harshly. By accepting that pardon through Supreme Court precedents, he’s actually accepting his guilt, so he’s accepting culpability. He made the decision to bypass and to avoid the safety committee to fund this without adequate review of its safety. He made a terrible decision. But you have to realize it wasn’t a one-off. For over a decade, Anthony Fauci had said that the risks of a pandemic occurring were worth the benefit of the knowledge. Most other scientists disagree with that, but the idea that we could do anything to any virus, and if it escapes, oh well, whoops, too bad, the knowledge is worth it. It’s not. There are viruses that could kill 50 percent of humanity. We should not be trying to aerosolize Ebola or aerosolize the avian flu, or make it easier to transmit the avian flu among humans. Right now, our biggest benefit is the avian flu can get into humans, but it’s not going human to human. If you were to work in a lab with the avian flu, you can probably make the virus go human-to-human with intended or intentional mutations. That would be a disaster. And anybody who wants to do that in the lab should never be funded by the taxpayer. So, Anthony Fauci was wrong about all this, and he’s going to be judged harshly by history.”