Sen Rand Paul;

The coronavirus outbreak brought the world’s attention to the dangers of gain-of-function research. This kind of research occurs when a virus is manipulated to increase its strength or contagiousness—literally, causing it to gain a function.

Dr. Anthony Fauci continues to repeat the talking points of the Chinese Communist Party and insists that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to an intermediate host animal, then to humans. A wet market in Wuhan, China, is allegedly where this “spillover” occurred.

Yet according to Chinese officials—who have a big incentive to disprove a laboratory accident—none of the animals at that market when it closed, and none of the animals in its supply chain were infected with SARS-CoV-2. In fact, in roughly three years since the pandemic began, not one animal has been identified that was infected with the virus before it infected humans.

In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit organization, applied for funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In its grant application, EcoHealth proposed inserting a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses that interact with furin, an enzyme in human cells. However, DARPA rejected that proposal because adding a furin cleavage site would make the coronavirus more lethal in humans.

Only 18 months later, COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan—but nowhere else. Unlike the original SARS virus and the 2013 avian flu, SARS-CoV-2 didn’t spring up in separate geographic regions (as you would expect of a virus circulating in another species). Instead, it spread from a single location and seemed well-adapted from the beginning to spark a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Genetically, the feature that equips the virus to replicate so quickly is a furin cleavage site in its spike protein. Yet no other SARS-related coronavirus has ever been found in nature exhibiting this feature.

As we later learned, the Wuhan Institute of Virology partnered with EcoHealth on another project involving gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses. However, unlike the project DARPA had rejected, this one found a U.S. government agency willing to fund it: Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.