Rand Paul: Congress is not allowed to know about top secret gain of function research committee

Appearing on Fox News to discuss the first ever Senate hearing on gain of function research, Rand Paul revealed that there is a committee that is supposed to oversee such experimentation with potentially lethal viruses, but that it is above the oversight of Congress.

(Article by  republished from Summit.News)

Paul noted that according to scientists who testified on Capitol Hill yesterday, “the committee that is supposed to review these viruses is secret.”

“We don’t know the names. We don’t know that they ever meet, and we don’t have any records of their meetings,” the Senator reiterated, adding “It’s top-secret. Congress is not allowed to know. So whether the committee actually exists, we’re uncertain.”

“We do know that they’ve met three times and there are thousands of gain-of-function research proposals. They’ve only met three times, they’ve only reviewed three projects,” Paul continued.

Three scientists testified during the hearing, they were Dr. Richard Ebright, laboratory director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, Kevin Esvelt, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and Dr. Steven Quay, CEO of Atossa Therapeutics Inc.

“The three scientists agreed that this was dangerous research. Two of the three absolutely said it was gain-of-function. The third said it was dangerous research and should have gone before a committee,” Paul asserted.

The Senator added that “When Dr. Fauci said, ‘Oh, we’ve reviewed this and the experts have looked at this, and said it’s not gain-of-function,’ even that wasn’t true. There was a committee that was formed after 2017 to look at this dangerous research. They didn’t look at this research at all because they never reviewed it. So no one reviewed this to say it wasn’t gain-of-function research. They didn’t review it, period.”

“So we learned a lot of things, but I think we reconfirmed that Dr. Fauci is not being honest with us,” Paul urged, adding “Yes, the NIH funded gain-of-function research. Yes, it was dangerous. And yes, nobody looked over this. Nobody reviewed the research. Yes, a million people died. And there still seems to be a significant lack of curiosity on the part of Democrats.”

Watch:

Senator Paul chaired the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee hearing because no Democrats even bothered to show up.

Watch Paul’s opening statement:

During the hearing, Dr. Ebright said that he stands by previous statements he has made charging that Anthony Fauci “lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public knowingly, willfully, brazenly.”

“The statements made on repeated occasions to the public, the press, and to policymakers by the NIAID director, Dr. Fauci, have been untruthful,” Ebright said, adding “I do not understand why those statements are being made, because they are demonstrably false.”

Dr. Esvelt warned that “we are so used to thinking of pandemics as a health and safety issue that we have missed the national security implications of identifying viruses that could be deliberately unleashed to kill millions of people.”

Dr. Quay outlined how the idea that the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan wet market is highly unlikely, noting “There is no dispositive evidence the pandemic began as a spillover of a natural virus in a market,” and further declaring “All evidence is consistent with a laboratory-acquired infection.”

“The virus has three genomic regions that have the signature of synthetic biology—that is, gain-of-function research,” Quay said in his opening statement, adding “One region has features of the two types of forbidden gain-of-function research that are associated with bioweapons development: asymptomatic transmission and immune-system evasion.”

Watch the entire hearing below:

PART 1

PART 2

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