Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, is probably Anthony Fauci’s least favorite person. Which means Paul is doing a good job. Here Paul chronicles his problems with the Talleyrand of the medical profession.

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Paul: In January, I asked Dr. Anthony Fauci a pretty basic question: “Do you really think it’s appropriate to use your $420,000 salary to attack scientists that you disagree with?” Given Dr. Fauci’s theatrical outburst and deflection in response to my question, I think I hit a nerve.

Answering that question truthfully, which he is legally compelled to do when speaking before Congress, would have meant illuminating the deceitful game he and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins have been playing about COVID’s origins and their support of the type of dangerous research that could have led to the pandemic.

How ironic that the frantic efforts by Fauci and Collins to label esteemed scientists as “fringe” and “conspiracy theorists” for daring to suggest that COVID came from a lab was actually a sinister conspiracy of their own.

They diligently worked with Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance – which was a recipient of NIH funds to study bat coronaviruses and the potential risks to humans at a lab located in China – to discredit those who deign to question their conclusions. This triumvirate of gain-of-function research cheerleaders worked with their allies to, in the words of Collins, “take down” scientists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford for simply considering the merits of a lab leak theory.

Why such aggressive behavior toward their scientific colleagues? One reason is that their gain-of-function research, funded by your tax dollars, was at stake. Dr. Fauci has been a longtime supporter of this type of research. Gain-of-function research is conducted by taking a known virus and conducting experiments to create new viruses that are not found in nature.

Despite Dr. Fauci’s ducking and dodging when I’ve asked him about his funding of gain-of-function research in China, we have the receipts. The agency Dr. Fauci heads, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), awarded a grant (Project Number 1R01AI110964-01) with a subcontract to the Wuhan Lab of Virology, where researchers combined a gene from one SARS-related coronavirus with the genetic information of another SARS-related coronavirus and constructed new coronaviruses that infected human cells. That is gain-of-function, and plenty of scientists have called it as such.

Although the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown, its unique structure, specifically its furin cleavage site, which has not been found in natural coronaviruses, suggests it may have been developed through dangerous research of this kind. As former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade recently reported, at first, because of the furin cleavage site, “the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation.”

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And this wasn’t the first time our government had heard about something like a furin cleavage site inserted into a coronavirus. In 2018, the Wuhan Lab submitted a proposal to DARPA to do just that, and the proposal was denied because of the danger of increasing human infectivity.

To be clear, the virologists consulted in the early days of the pandemic immediately thought the lab leak theory was credible, and the lab where it could have come from happened to be a place where they performed dangerous (U.S. funded) gain-of-function research. That same lab had previously attempted to secure funding to create a virus with a very specific attribute – which was remarkably found in the novel coronavirus. That’s not a conspiracy, those are just facts.