A leading health scientist has testified before the United States Senate that Dr. Anthony Fauci and other federal health officials have been lying about U.S. taxpayer-funded coronavirus research in China.
Dr. Richard Ebright, a professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University, gave the explosive testimony before U.S. senators during a Wednesday hearing.
Ebright charges that Fauci and other federal officials have repeatedly lied to Congress about the government’s funding of gain-of-function research in Chinese laboratories.
The research is believed by many experts to be the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The professor testified that statements “made on repeated occasions to the public, to the press, and to policymakers by the NIAID director, Dr. Fauci, have been untruthful.”
“I do not understand why those statements are being made because they are demonstrably false,” he said.
Dr. Ebright gave his testimony before the Senate hearing: “Revisiting Gain-of-Function Research: What the Pandemic Taught Us and Where Do We Go From Here.”
The hearing was held by the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight.
The panel’s ranking member, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), has repeatedly sparred over the issue in numerous Senate hearings with Fauci.
However, Fauci insists the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has not funded gain-of-function research in China, despite evidence to the contrary.
During his Wednesday testimony, Ebright argued that NIH-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to increase the lethality and transmissibility of bat coronaviruses, fits the definition of gain-of-function research.
“Gain-of-function research of concern involves the creation of new health threats – health threats that did not exist previously and that might not have come to exist by natural means for tens, hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of years,” Ebright said.
During a May 2021 Senate hearing, Fauci stated emphatically in a heated exchange with Sen. Paul that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Ebright was not the only expert to testify about the research on Wednesday.
Dr. Steven Quay, whose research became part of a State Department probe of the origin of COVID-19 under President Donald Trump, was also called before the Senate as a witness.
Quay is also chief executive officer at Atossa Therapeutics Inc.
Last December, he co-wrote a Wall Street Journal column citing four studies that provide strong evidence for the lab-leak theory.
Two of those studies were from the World Health Organization (WHO).
One study, published by Nature Medicine, concluded the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was 99.5% optimized for human infection.
The conclusion is a strong confirmation of the lab-leak hypothesis.
Testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, Quay was asked by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) if he was concerned about the expansion of Chinese gain-of-function research.
Quay pointed to research that was being carried out in China in December 2019, shortly after the outbreak of COVID-19.
At the time, Chinese researchers were “doing synthetic biology on a cloning vector of the Nipah virus, which is 60% lethal,” Quay revealed.
“We just experienced a 1% lethal virus,” he said, referring to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
He explained that the Black Plague was a 20% lethal event that set the world back 250 years.
A pandemic of the Nipah virus would “set us back a millennium,” he warned.
The Nipah virus, which is associated with encephalitis, causes severe swelling of the brain.
WATCH:
Sen. Josh Hawley: "Are you concerned with the continuation and expansion of Chinese gain-of-function research?"
Dr. Quay: "They were doing synthetic biology on a cloning vector of the Nipah virus, which is 60% lethal. We just experienced a 1% lethal virus…" pic.twitter.com/ydeY1Gj8OE
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 3, 2022
