On Tuesday, during an appearance on FNC’s “Special Report,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) insisted that whether the question about COVID-19 leaking from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan was to be answered was to be determined if the Chinese government engaged in operating profit research.
Paul’s comments came on the eve of a Senate hearing on the matter.
“Before we get to the bottom of whether the virus came from a lab, we have to investigate, did they do a profit research?” he said. “Did they take viruses, mix them with unknown viruses and create more deadly viruses or viruses that were more infectious or contagious? I say without a doubt that they did that. Anthony Fauci says it wasn’t. Tomorrow we have the first operating profit hearing on Capitol Hill, the first exploration of this issue in two years. A million Americans died and we didn’t have a single hearing. Tomorrow, we have the first hearing, and I’m going to have three scientists, very distinguished scientists, scientists with hundreds of publications, peer-reviewed publications, journal editors — this is an elite group of scientists who will be there tomorrow — I’m going to ask them, it was research profit-function that was taking place in Wuhan?’
“That doesn’t prove it came from a lab, but it does prove that dangerous research was going on there and that it could have come from the lab,” Paul continued. “And my question is, even if we don’t know for sure, let’s say it’s 50/50, it’s still a strong possibility that it came from a lab. At that point, wouldn’t we want to make sure that we control – do we have restrictions on the export of nuclear technology? Should we have restrictions on the export of DNA technology to Communist China? I think yes.”
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