Transcription
party this morning. All this gets underway at 10:00 eastern.
Now, despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact that research on dangerous pathogens and Biolabs can have, politicians and so-called health professionals like Doctor Fauci, as well as entities within the Biden administration's national security team, lied repeatedly to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported Biolabs. Not only did they lie, they threatened those who attempted to expose the truth.
For years, anyone who questioned U.S.-funded biological research overseas that could be considered gain-of-function was often dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Well, now, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, as you heard, has declassified documents she says show the U.S.-supported or funded more than 120 biological labs across more than 30 countries, including facilities in Ukraine, working with some of the world's most dangerous pathogens. Now, the debate is not whether these programs existed, but what former federal officials said during and after the Covid pandemic, as lawmakers demand accountability at the forefront of this debate. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Good morning to you, Senator, great to see you this morning.
Good morning.
So for years, Senator, you clashed with Doctor Anthony Fauci. You clashed with other public health officials over gain-of-function research and the origins of Covid, which, as we know, Covid fundamentally changed the risk calculation around this type of research, where scientists would juice up viruses to make them more dangerous and perhaps develop a vaccine or treatment. So, what was the most significant new fact revealed in these declassified documents, and why does it matter?
It's not surprising to me, but that the government lied. So, when this was brought out a couple of years ago that these labs existed in Ukraine, and there was particular danger there because they were in the middle of a war, they all said, "Oh, you're crazy. It's conspiracy theory. This doesn't really exist."
And then it turns out with the new revelations that, yes, of course, they were. And some of the research, we believe, is farmed out to third world countries and other countries because they know it's dangerous, and they know we would object if we discovered it on our soil. So, they're actually taking it to foreign countries to do dangerous research because they think there'll be less objection. Sometimes, the foreign countries will take it simply because we pay for it and the money. But why would we be doing this? Why would we be funding these labs all over the world? It's a terrible thing. And I'm glad that Tulsi Gabbard has has declassified this. And we're not done with this. We are going to go lab by lab, and we're going to expose the individual pathogens that they're using. And the danger.
Senator, critics will argue these labs were not a secret and that the Pentagon, during the Biden administration, disclosed funding for some of these overseas facilities, including the dozens you mentioned in Ukraine. Yes, yes, a war zone. Do you agree with that? Did they disclose, did the Pentagon disclose funding for these overseas facilities?
Well, the interesting thing is, when they say they're not a secret, why did they tell us they didn't exist at all? So now they're saying they weren't a secret. But at the time, when we were pointing this out, they were saying, "Oh, it's just a conspiracy theory. They don't exist at all. You've completely made it up."
Now that we've caught them with the goods, we have the receipts. They're now saying, "Oh, well, everybody knows about them." The other argument they will make is, "Oh, these are just for agricultural purposes purposes or just animal viruses."
But the devil is in the detail, because what they do is, let's say, the avian flu. The avian flu is very, very dangerous in humans, but it doesn't go human to human. We don't want to be supporting a lab in Ukraine that might be taking the avian flu and putting it in humanized mice and growing it serially to get it to be more adaptive to humans. That's what they did with the coronavirus. That's what they were doing in Wuhan.
So, absolutely, they need to tell us, and I can tell you as a member of the Senate, they hide this from me. A lot of it is done through the Defense Department, but it's also Defense Department intelligence. The Intelligence Committee is perpetually hiding things from me and from the American people. I'll give you an example. The Church Committee sought to reform our intelligence community back in 1976. I've been trying to read The associated classified version of it. It's 50 years old. They're hiding it from me. It's in a room of 400 boxes. They won't let my staff go in the room. They say I can come in and look through the 400 boxes. And what I'm looking for is a 50-page document that I'm sure they can find, but they won't give it to me. But this is the resistance you get from the intelligence community. Most of the funding I'm looking at now is classified, unnecessarily so, but I can't get to it because they won't let me know the actual details. When I send a letter to the Intel committee, I get stymied because they think their job is to protect the spies from any kind of oversight.
So is this the reason why you think they're right? Why would they hide it?
They hide it because they don't want scrutiny. And so, let's say that they are working with the avian flu. They'll say, "Oh, we're trying to stop the avian flu." And I would say, "Well, I need to see the experiment you're doing to see if I think it'll stop it."
So, a lot of things, for example, they say the State Department funded for ten years identification of viruses. Well, who could be opposed to that? Identifying viruses maybe could help stop them. But it was more than identification. They would get a virus and they would say, "Well, I wonder what happens if we mix it with this other virus." We take an S protein from this coronavirus, stick it on here, and then we see if it infects humanized cells. Well, that's no longer identification. That's a gain-of-function experiment.
So, what I'm proposing is a presidential commission with scientists to review all research from here forward and to scrutinize whether or not it is gain-of-function and try to stop it before it happens. But this includes all the biolabs overseas. All that research needs to be scrutinized by someone who's objective. Doctor Anthony Fauci wasn't objective. He was an advocate for gain-of-function research. He wrote op-eds about it. In fact, he said in a 2010 Washington Post, "Even if a pandemic occurs, the knowledge is worth the risk." Well, 15 million people died under Covid may not agree with that.
It's funny you say that, because every time he spoke about the government, not funding gain of research, he said under the government's, quote, "technical and regulatory definition of gain of function." What did he mean by that?
He would argue that if you don't intend to gain function, then it's not a gain-of-function experiment. So, if you take two viruses and you mix them together and then grow them in humanized cells, that is gain-of-function, he would say, "Oh, well, if you're surprised and it multiplies and grows well and you've now gained function." "Oh, you were just surprised." And then what they did in Wuhan is they said, "Oh, yeah, it grew, it grew tenfold." But as long as it doesn't grow a hundred fold. So, they started adding extra definitions to it. But all of these are gain-of-function. The interim NIH director, Tabarrok, came in and testified that, yes, it was gain-of-function, just not technically so according to Doctor Anthony Fauci's definition, which he kept changing. He changed the definition one time, right before a committee hearing I had with him, he changed the definition.
Your committee also recently released new documents detailing Doctor Fauci's role in the early days of the pandemic. And you've argued his preemptive pardon should be challenged in court. Why do you believe that pardon is not going to legally hold up?
Well, we've never had a pardon that's gone to court that was granted for an unspecified crime. So, he's been pardoned for any crime he might have committed over a ten-year period. He's never been charged with a crime. So, how do you pardon someone in advance of a charge and for any crime they might be charged with over a ten-year period? So, I think a court could look at this and say, "That's way too broad." If you didn't specifically pardon him for something, he's not pardoned. So, I think it should be challenged in court. And I think it's worthwhile. But he's guilty of several felonies. He's guilty of lying to Congress on gain-of-function, but he's also guilty of destroying records. That was an open-shut case. He not only destroyed records, but he would send emails to others and say, "When you read this, destroy it." So, he's guilty of multiple crimes, and someone needs to have the guts to indict him. He needs to be investigated mainly because he is the the paragon of an example of a guy who funded research so dangerous that it may well have led to the deaths of 15 million people.
Kentucky Sen.