SE Illinois News

Illinois state Rep. Mary Miller is accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of lying to the American public, after National Institute of Health Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak revealed in a memo last month that the NIH, under Fauci’s oversight, funded research in the Wuhan, China lab where many believe COVID-19 originated. 

“Dr. Fauci lied repeatedly about the NIH funding gain-of-function research in China. His agency ALSO spent millions of tax dollars on animal testing that involved the brutal abuse and murder of puppies  Yet, he’s still our government’s highest paid employee #FauciLiedDogsDied,” Miller tweeted.  

Fauci, the director of (NIH)'s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to the president, makes over $417,000 per year.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) said Fauci "should be fired.”

“The thing is, is just for lack of judgment of nothing else, and I, you know, he's probably never going to admit that he lied, he's going to continue to dissemble and try to work around the truth and massage the truth,” Rand told HBO’s Axios.

The finds were allegedly provided through New York-based EcoHealth Alliance.

At the heart of the debate is whether an NIH letter described funding "gain-of-function" research — or research involving modifying a pathogen to be more virulent or infectious to humans. NIH says the letter does not.

The Intercept noted in a late September article that U.S. military research agency DARPA conducted research in 2018 speculating on how such an addition of the "spike proteins" mentioned in the letter would allow the disease to be transmitted to humans. The proteins did not appear in virus cells naturally, and many have claimed that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with genetic changes at the exact proposed sites laid out in the DARPA report. 

A number of scientists reviewed the documentation, finding the modifications in COVID-19 to be consistent with the proposed research. Fauci, however, told ABC on Sunday that it was "molecularly impossible" for the strain in the experiments to become COVID-19.

“In the letter they acknowledge that yes, the viruses did gain in function, they became more dangerous. So they've created a virus that doesn't exist in nature to become more dangerous, that is gain of function,” Paul said of the additional details released in the NIH memo.

Paul, who is also a physician, said the aim of the U.S.-funded COVID-19 research in the Wuhan lab was clear.

“Now they try to justify it by saying well it was an unexpected result. I'm not sure I buy that. Think about it. You take an unknown virus, you combine it with another virus and you get a super virus. You have no idea whether it gains functions or loses function, that's what the experiment is, but I don't know how anybody could argue that that's not gain of function research,” Paul said.

In the face of increasing pressure over COVID-19’s origins earlier this year, Zhao Lijian, deputy director of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the virus was planted in Wuhan by the United States.