U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Newsmax on Tuesday night he is going to continue to push government agencies about releasing information regarding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier in the day, Paul confronted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorkas during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which Paul is the ranking member. Paul told Mayorkas requests to the department regarding any information it has about the virus' origins have been ignored.
"You say there hasn't been much, and maybe there hasn't been, but we would like to get responses to these things," Paul said at the hearing. "Instead of responses. It's a, you know, take a leap."
Paul told "Eric Bolling The Balance" there needs to be pushback for more information, especially since Congress passed legislation last month signed by President Joe Biden to declassify all government information regarding the virus' origins.
"I also mentioned to him that we unanimously voted in the House and the Senate to declassify all this material so we can begin to understand and let the public understand the great deal of information that points toward this being a leak from a lab, and we didn't get a lot of information from him," Paul said. "But I keep pushing all of them because there are 17 different intelligence agencies that report to the Director of National Intelligence. And at least two of those agencies, the FBI and the Department of Energy, have now said that they believe that the virus did leak from a lab."
A report by Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, of which Paul is a member, showed it's possible the coronavirus was leaked from two labs. Paul said people would be surprised by how common lab leaks are.
"For anybody who thinks that leaks are uncommon or unusual, leaks are very common," Paul said. "There have been 100 leaks from highly secure labs in the U.S. in the last decade. Just since the pandemic started, after they got [the virus] from humans and were studying it in a lab, a variant of actually leaked from a lab in Beijing.
"… The reason I keep pointing this out is this virus overall had less than a 1% mortality [rate], but it still killed a million Americans. Imagine if a virus leaks that has 50% mortality [rate]. There are viruses out there that have 50% mortality [rates], and we'd hate to see one of those leak from a lab."
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