In an appearance on The Hill’s “Rising” on Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) took aim at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Monday.
Paul addressed Fauci’s responses, suggesting they contradicted known facts about how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — the agency Fauci led for 38 years — and its parent agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“NIH is actually more secretive than the CIA, and that’s alarming and disturbing and really should not be tolerated,” Paul told co-hosts Robby Soave and Briahna Joy Gray.
Paul addressed Fauci’s efforts to distance himself from his longtime aide David Morens, who in emails boasted that he could evade Freedom of Information Act requests by deleting any potential “smoking guns.”
Paul criticized gain-of-function research, which he said occurred under Fauci’s leadership of NIAID, and called for it to be banned. He also suggested COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in late 2019.
Paul’s interview came on the heels of revelations that the NIAID received $690 million of $710 million in NIH royalty income between 2022 and 2023.
It also came days after the release of the transcripts of Fauci’s two-day closed-door House interview in January and a House memorandum with key takeaways from that interview.
Paul has long been a critic of Fauci. In October 2021, he claimed Fauci was “spreading mistruths.” In August 2023, he said Fauci committed perjury and called on the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an investigation. In October 2023, he accused Fauci of leading the “great COVID cover-up.”
Hellbound and Down 