Speaking ahead of the deadline for the Biden administration to declassify "any and all information" related to the origins of COVID-19, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called gain of function research the "biggest danger to mankind" and said the United States should not fund it at home or abroad.
Paul said on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," "Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, and ... Alex Gutentag" in an article "reveal that the first people to get sick from COVID were three scientists, that they worked in the Wuhan lab with the bat scientist Dr. Shi [Zhengli].
"In fact, one of them, the one they think that was the first scientist to get sick, the first person to get sick, was one of the ones creating these new viruses, viruses not found in nature. This is the gain of function research.
"And so this essentially closes the deal," Paul said. "What I'm going to try to pursue now is, whoever revealed this, if there's documentation of this, it's all supposed to be declassified tomorrow. And that legislation passed unanimously. If ... we can get those records and actually put it out there for all the public to see that the first person that got sick was a scientist at the lab, then it's a done deal."
Paul said "reform" should follow from Monday's revelations.
"The reform is: We shouldn't be funding this research in China, but we also shouldn't be funding this kind of research in the United States," he said, adding that the blame for the pandemic should fall on both China and the U.S.
"The blame equally should go not only to Chinese authorities, but to Anthony Fauci and all those who advocated for this," he stated. "... Look, Bill Gates has been over there recently. Bill Gates is the largest funder of trying to find these viruses in remote caves and bring them to big cities. What happened in China is they went eight to 10 hours south of Wuhan, 2 to 300 feet deep into a ... cave, found viruses, and took them back to the city of 15 million."
Paul, who has been a vocal critic of Fauci, said that Gates could be funding "the biggest danger to mankind."
"[T]his has largely been funded by Bill Gates, who funds the WHO [World Health Organization] more than most countries do. So there's a responsibility there," he added.
Paul said Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was involved in a complex cover-up regarding gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"He knew from the very beginning not only was he funding the Wuhan research, but he was going around the regulatory apparatus to let it happen, even though the rules said it shouldn't have happened without more scrutiny," he said. "This is a man, Anthony Fauci, who said in 2012 that this kind of research to create new viruses was so important that even if a pandemic should take place, that it'd be worth the knowledge. I think there's several million people — particularly a million Americans — who would question whether that was good judgment or not."
In an effort to curb gain of function research, Paul suggested an "international consortium of countries" to agree collectively on restrictions. He said failure to do so could lead to an even more catastrophic outcome in the event of another pandemic.
"There are people estimating that the next time this happens, the next time we have a leak from a lab, that between 5 and 50% of the population could die from another manmade virus. So this is very, very serious.
"This is up there with nuclear arms control. This is up there with the danger of nuclear war. But this is much more insidious. It's harder to trace. But still, millions of people can die from a manmade virus."