Verbal tensions escalated between a senior US infectious disease specialist and a Senate member at Tuesday’s session.
According to the Associated Press, repeated quarrels between Anthony Fauci, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the president’s adviser to Rand Paul, the Republican senator, have once again come to the forefront of Congress.
Fauci angrily confronted Rand Paul at a Senate committee meeting Tuesday. He denied Paul’s allegations that the United States was involved in financing a laboratory in China that was believed to be responsible for the corona outbreak.
Fauci addressed a meeting of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Retirement Affairs, claiming that a research paper cited by Rand Paul referred to another type of virus that has nothing to do with Corona.
“Senator Paul, let me tell you honestly, you do not know what you are talking about, and I urge you to make it official that you do not know what you are talking about,” Fauci said sharply.
“Senator!” “If anyone is lying here, it’s you.”
Rand Paul had previously said that Dr. Fauci was trying to hide his responsibility for the deaths of 4 million people worldwide due to the outbreak of Covid-19.
“Do you mean that our actions have caused the death of people?” Fauci replied. This really makes me angry. Senator! “If anyone is lying here, it’s you.”
Rand Paul has recently cited an article claiming that a laboratory in Wuhan, China, was conducting illegal research on “certain pathogenic pathogens.”
The debate over the origins of the coronavirus has intensified in recent months following a report in the Wall Street Journal. The report claimed that three laboratory staff in Wuhan City, China, had become seriously ill just before the corona outbreak. The newspaper considered the illness of the laboratory staff as a confirmation of the laboratory’s claim to publish Corona.
A day later, the Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected the Wall Street Journal’s claim, calling it “completely untrue.” “Wuhan Institute of Virology issued a statement on March 23 (April 3) stating that as of December 30, 2019, there would be no cases of infection due to the infection,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in response to the US newspaper’s claim. “He was not exposed to the new corona virus.”
Earlier, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s research team, after spending several weeks in China examining the origins of the coronavirus, concluded that the spread of the disease from a Wuhan laboratory was “highly unlikely.”
Despite this, the US government is apparently trying to use the allegations about the origin of the corona virus to put political pressure on China.
According to Fars, a US government-affiliated laboratory has claimed in recent weeks that the hypothesis that the Corona virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan was completely tolerable and needed further investigation.
The Wall Street Journal claimed that the study was prepared in May 2020 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and that the State Department in the final months of Trump’s presidency called for further research into the source of the corona outbreak.
The Wall Street Journal claimed that the report came to Congress after Biden instructed US intelligence agencies to report their findings on how the virus spread within 90 days.
