Sen. Rand Paul argues that getting answers about COVID-19 is more important than seeking criminal charges against Anthony Fauci. In an interview with Stephen A. Smith, Paul said the priority has always been accountability and the truth, not punishment. “I’ve always been more interested in the truth than any kind of prosecution,” Paul said on Thursday. “I’m not against prosecution, but I’m more interested in the truth. I would have accepted and really commended if he would have come and apologized, or even now, if he were to make a public pronouncement saying, I made a mistake.”

STEPHEN A. SMITH, HOST: Here’s what I do know. When you talk about Democratic officials, and how them and their allies made Fauci practically untouchable, are we going to deny that that was true? Are we going to deny that that was true? Because I’m here to tell you, I’d be damned if it wasn’t. But I’ll explain that part a little bit later on in the show. For now, it’s time to get to our next guest. He’s a senator representing the great state of Kentucky. He’s been on this show before, and he’s back here again right now. Please welcome Senator Rand Paul to the show, who has been an incessant critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci throughout this whole coronavirus pandemic ordeal. He has not shied away from calling Rand Paul to the carpet. He’s a doctor by profession, by the way, not just a senator. Let’s welcome Senator Rand Paul to the show. Hello, sir, how are you? SEN. RAND PAUL (R-KY): Thanks for having me, glad to be with you. SMITH: Put into perspective what transpired yesterday with this hearing involving Dr. Anthony Fauci. He was subpoenaed, he did show up, but he took the fifth. He pled the Fifth Amendment 111 times. Number one, did you expect that? And if so, why? PAUL: We weren’t certain, we thought it might happen, but I didn’t know until that moment that he wasn’t gonna testify. I really did want him to testify and still want some questions to be answered. The most important question is, should the taxpayer fund research where we take an animal virus and mutate it to become a human virus? We basically create a new virus that doesn’t exist in nature, and we have the ability to do it. Scientifically, we can replace gene by gene. In 2010, they took the bird flu and they replaced eight genes, but they made it transmissible through the air, aerosolized it between mammals, and it wasn’t before. I think it makes no sense, the bird flu is about 50% deadly. If you make it more transmissible to humans, like what we think happened with COVID-19, it would be a death wish for the world. I mean, it spreads very rapidly, respiratory virus, very deadly. But the reason we don’t, while we don’t have a pandemic right now with the bird flu, is it doesn’t go human to human. We think COVID-19 started out going human to human so quickly is because it was modified in the lab. It was pre-adapted to go human to human. And they do this, interestingly, with mice that have human lungs. I know that sounds kind of science fiction, but they’ve created mice that are basically human. When the virus looks at the lung cells, they are human. And they just culture this thing over and over. It’s called serial passage until they get a virus that can infect humans. And it’s a terrible thing. And Fauci knew all along what they were doing. In his private notes, he says, we suspect they might have manipulated because we know they do gain-of-function research. He says this in private, but then in public he says, it came from nature, and that if you think otherwise, you’re a conspiracy theorist. So I wish he had answered the questions. SMITH: He has served, Dr. Fauci, we’re talking about here. He’s been in a lot of people’s eyes, he’s a career civil servant who spent 38 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. They think about his years of service. And yet at the age of 85, having retired, he’s on Capitol Hill, and it seemed as if you had politicians up there who wanted him in jail. And he has said he has called your pursuit of him an unhinged obsession, and that you want him in jail. Speak to that for a second, and what your feelings are about him at this particular moment in time, and what they have been since the pandemic took place years ago, so everybody will understand. PAUL: My questions, I think, have all been very serious. A million Americans died, about 15 million people died worldwide. Where did this come from? What is the evidence for the lab? What is the evidence for it coming from the wet market? So the other thing we learned recently from their investigation that I led was that in January of 2020, at the very beginning, he was told that the earliest cases did not come from the wet market. He acknowledges it, and he says that the wet market was likely a super spreader. It didn’t originate there, it wasn’t from the wild animals at the wet market. That was a super spreader event. So he knew this in January of 2020, but you’ve seen him on the media. For the last five years, he continues to say it came from the wet market, it came from the wet market. The wet market’s a problem. We need to ban and close the wet market. Why? Now, if you were just a disinterested scientist that didn’t have anything to gain, you’d say, well, he’s just being honest. That’s his opinion. Why condemn him? But what if you also know that he funded the lab that it came from? Would he have a self-interest in protecting himself by arguing it came from nature? So he’s not a disinterested observer. He’s not an objective person. He’s a person who, if it came from the lab, would share responsibility. So he had every reason to hide and cover up, and that’s why his statements in private are diametrically opposite of his statements in public. SMITH: What about the notion that he could just say, listen, we were in pursuit of something, we made a mistake, and move forward? I mean, it would seem like, I hate to put it this way, but science is not an exact science. I mean, there’s a lot of imperfections that come along with it. You’re not just a senator. You’re a medical professional. A lot of people don’t realize it. They don’t notice about you. You’re a medical professional. And so when you look at it from a doctor, so when you look at it from that standpoint, it’s not perfect. Imperfections come along with this line of work one could easily argue. Why couldn’t Fauci just acknowledge that and move on? PAUL: I was open yesterday and still am open to an apology and that he wants to modify his point of view. The problem is this. This didn’t start in 2020. This really starts in at least 2010. So he funded research in the Netherlands to mutate the avian flu in 2010. This is when the controversy began. I wasn’t part of this controversy. I really wasn’t even aware of this until 2021. But the controversy raged in the scientific community. A group of scientists led by a scientist at MIT started the Cambridge Working Group and they criticized the publication of this because they said, if you publish this mutation and how you did it, it’ll be a roadmap for bioweapons and every lunatic out there that has the skills to do this will now have a roadmap as to create biological weapons. So they argued it shouldn’t be published and it shouldn’t be funded. Anthony Fauci argued in 2010, this is way before the pandemic. This isn’t like he made a mistake in the pandemic. He had a philosophic belief that this research was good. So he writes an op-ed in the Washington Post and in that he says that even if a scientist is bitten, even if a pandemic escapes from a lab, the knowledge is worth the risks. Now that’s a philosophic position. I don’t think he wants to back away. He could back away from that, but he didn’t decide in 2020 to do this. He decided back in 2010. The funding of the lab in Wuhan begins in 2014. It’s not a coincidence that his pardon starts in 2014 and goes forward because that’s when the lab began being funded. But he philosophically agrees with this. But this isn’t just me speaking. There’s a scientist at Stanford by the name of David Relman. He has classified clearance. He’s advised the government. He understands this science as well as Anthony Fauci or better. He looked at this experiment that Anthony Fauci funded in the Netherlands on the bird flu to juice up the bird flu, and he said it never should have happened and it never should have been published. So like I say, this debate has raged for 10 years. It was outside the circle of the news like you and I talk about or even what I was interested in. It was outside the circle until a pandemic occurred. And then some people say, oh, it could never happen, it’s just crazy, it still could have been nature. Well, this isn’t the first time. In 1977, there was a Russian flu, it was an influenza, and they’re not positive exactly where it started, but they were able to sequence it. So they looked at the DNA sequence or RNA sequence of this influenza virus from 1977. You know what they discovered? It was identical to a virus in 1954. Well, how could that be possible? Because viruses mutate a little bit every month, and something that originated in 54 would be 20 or 30% different by the time you get to 1977. It was identical. And the conclusion was it had to have gotten out of a lab, and they had vaccines for this virus. There were a handful of labs that had it, and somebody was working with it, and it got infected or infected somebody or an animal bit somebody and it got out of a lab. It went worldwide. The reason you haven’t heard about it, or probably haven’t heard about it, is it had no death rate. It was an influenza, and maybe somebody died, but it wasn’t like COVID where millions of people died. But these accidents happen, labs are not perfect, but you add to this that this happened in China where their labs were not at the level of our labs. Their labs had never been inspected. Anthony Fauci was asked, did your laboratory inspectors go to China before you sent the money? You knew they were doing dangerous research there. Did you go and inspect their lab? Did you ask them and ascertain what kind of experiments they were doing? So this isn’t about, look, I didn’t even know who Anthony Fauci was before 2020. I know he’d been prominent in certain circles here, but I just didn’t know who he was. When he first came before him, I had nothing against him. I still have nothing against him personally. But I do think that there has to be responsibility for who makes the decisions on funding and whether it’s dangerous or not. And if he’s still not willing to admit it’s dangerous, then what if his friends and his colleagues are in charge again and they start funding this? SMITH: Let me go back to the NIH in this regard. NIH funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, obviously. Fauci says the definition didn’t apply. Who gets to decide which definition is correct, scientists, Congress, a jury, who? How do you answer that question, Senator Paul? PAUL: Well, I think it’s a great question and I think the people should, through their representatives, and it does get specifically handed down to other people. But here’s the thing on gain-of-function, whether it was or wasn’t. You can have a semantics debate and we can have the debate, but the interesting thing is EcoHealth, which was the collector of the money that was working with the scientists in Wuhan, they write when their funding gets turned back on. It was turned off temporarily. When it gets turned back on, they write the NIH and say, thank you for turning back on our gain-of-function research money. They’re acknowledging it is. In a subject headline in an email from Anthony Fauci’s assistant, I think it’s from Fauci too, his assistant, he has in the subject line, gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and he lists the research project that in public he says wasn’t gain-of-function. I think we get lost in the semantics of the argument because the science will get us all jumbled up. Was it dangerous or was it not dangerous? Should it have been funded? That’s the real question. Did it meet a precise definition? He might be able to make some argument that it met a precise definition, but the real question is, was it dangerous? Was it a lab that was sort of a cowboy rogue lab in China, in a country that’s very opaque, doesn’t always tell us the truth, and is known for withholding the facts? Yeah. So, I think really, if we get away from the semantics, we just argue, was it dangerous or wasn’t it? Should it have been funded or wasn’t it? Were there other scientists saying we shouldn’t fund it? Yeah, there’s many, many esteemed scientists saying we should have never funded this research in Wuhan. SMITH: We’ve only got a few minutes left because I know you’ve got to go on and deeply appreciate your time. When we talk about the funding, how much was spent with our taxpayer dollars towards this lab and this research? PAUL: So millions of dollars went to the research project. Some of it was spent at the UNC in North Carolina, and then some of it was spent in Wuhan. At least a sub-grant of $ 600,000 went to Wuhan, but another $ 600,000 also went to a veterinary lab very close. That’s the thing. You remember when Jon Stewart said, well, you know what, there is that coincidence. It is the Wuhan virus, and there’s this lab called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There’s so many coronaviruses in Wuhan and in China. That’s where the biggest repository is in the world. It’s hard to explain that coincidence. In fact, the researcher from UNC, Ralph Baric, he said, and he’s been quoted as saying this, well, the proximity, the proximity is the problem. From the closeness of this lab to where it started, it just would be an incredible coincidence that you get a pandemic in the same city that has the largest library of coronaviruses. SMITH: Last question to you. I saw Senator Howley, obviously he was all over Fauci in terms of Fauci becoming a celebrity and enjoying it. You threw Fauci’s attorney, had security remove Fauci’s attorney from the hearing because they weren’t supposed to be there, or actually sit in the second row, be quiet, et cetera. And they tried to invoke themselves, and you certainly weren’t having that. Senator Moreno really, really went off on Fauci. And then I saw Harvey Levin on TMZ compared this to McCarthyism. They’re saying he’s 85 years of age, 38 years of public service minimum, could have easily done a lot of different things, but chose to serve this country in an upstanding way. That’s their position. Where does this all sit right now? When we look at a man, 85 years of age, Howley called for charges of obstruction of justice. Obviously the state of Florida is now after him. They’re talking about an investigation. Other states may join in. Where does all of this end, Senator Paul? And how righteous do you believe this situation is right now in terms of everybody aiming their attention at Anthony Fauci? PAUL: I’ve always been more interested in the truth than any kind of prosecution. I’m not against prosecution, but I’m more interested in the truth. I would have accepted and really commended if he would have come and apologized, or even now, if he were to make a public pronouncement saying, I made a mistake. It was a judgment call. There are debates on both sides of this. This debate has raged for 15 years on gain of function. But given that there’s a chance that this pandemic came from the lab and from funding that I sent to this lab, that I’m acknowledging that I made a mistake, that would be huge. We all make mistakes, but it’s a matter of accepting that because going forward, if he keeps denying that it happened and that he has any responsibility for it, then it engenders all of this. But there were just so many things said in private. You remember being told not to go to Thanksgiving, not to celebrate? They’re celebrating. He’s having dinner with celebrities the same time he’s telling you not to celebrate. He’s telling his friends they don’t need to wear a mask because we’ve studied this and the masks don’t work, and then he’s wearing three masks. People have to judge whether they think this is something that’s a vendetta that I’ve come up with or whether it’s serious. The thing that argued for it being serious is a million Americans died, 15 million people died. It’s not me saying that this came from the lab. We have now hundreds of scientists, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy may have some of our best government scientists. They looked at this early on and came to the conclusion it came from the lab. I don’t know. I think it needs to be treated seriously. I still think we need legislation that looks at gain of function and says, this group of scientists, not me, not a politician, a group of scientists look at all of our experiments. We think that there’s still secret research going on from our government, particularly on monkeypox, that is gain of function research that they will not tell me about. We don’t have representatives. People are always saying, oh, democracy is under attack. Well, it certainly is if your representatives aren’t allowed to know about what your government’s doing. It’s one thing that people not knowing, but then you’ve elected people who are not being told. We think there’s experiments. We’ve asked about these experiments, and they will not tell me. I think that it’s an ongoing thing. This is what oversight of government is. You’ve got to fight sometimes with your own government, sometimes with the other party, sometimes with members of both parties opposing you. I won’t be satisfied until we change the U.S. law, but I’d also like to see an international, we have an international treaty called the Biological and Chemical Weapons Convention. It’s a treaty. The civilized countries of the world have agreed not to have chemical weapons, so we’ve been destroying nerve gas and chemical weapons for a long time. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think we should use it, and I don’t think civilized countries should. It’s not a guarantee that no other country will, but with regard to biological weapons, I’d like to see more conversations with our allies in Europe, with friendly countries around the world, and I think that’s a good idea, and that’s what I hope will be the final result of all of this. SMITH: So you’re an advocate of getting to the truth, not necessarily having him in jail. Senator Paul, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Last minute, really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much. PAUL: Thank you.

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