A tradition unlike any other.

Unfortunately there’s more heat than light in this latest exchange between them — which is surprising, since it was Paul’s first opportunity to question Fauci under oath since the letter from Lawrence Tabak at NIH was released a few weeks ago. In that letter, Tabak admitted that experiments in Wuhan funded by EcoHealth Alliance involving chimera viruses made genetically engineered mice sick. The spike protein from one newly discovered naturally occurring viruses was spliced into an already known naturally occurring virus and produced a pathogen that was more virulent than the known virus was in its natural form. Wasn’t that gain-of-function research? If it wasn’t, why didn’t EcoHealth report that finding in a timely way, as Tabak further alleged?

As you’ll see, instead of delving into the details of that research in Wuhan with Fauci, Paul basically just demanded that he admit that he’s been lying in testimony when he said his agency didn’t fund GOF in Wuhan. Fauci was never going to do that, of course. He did start to explain his reasoning on why the research described by Tabak doesn’t constitute GOF, something he’s been slippery about in the past. But Paul cut him off mid-answer to accuse him of a different type of slipperiness, claiming that his agency changed the definition of “gain of function” after the fact in order to let outfits like EcoHealth and the Wuhan lab off the hook.

We didn’t do it after the fact, Fauci insisted. “Gain of function” protocols were developed over the course of several years before the EcoHealth experiments took place and were codified in HHS’s P3CO Framework. Here’s the key part, which I’ve posted before:

Before Paul cut him off, I *think* Fauci was about to say that it’s a matter of intent. Splicing the spike protein of one virus onto another virus and then injecting that chimera into mice to see what would happen wouldn’t qualify as GOF because scientists had no reason to believe that the chimera was “likely” to be more transmissible or virulent. They didn’t know what would happen; in order to find out if the new spike protein was dangerous to humans or not, they had to test it on the mice. If they had expected the chimera to be more dangerous to people and went ahead and created it anyway, that would have been GOF and triggered extra scrutiny and precautions.

From Paul’s standpoint, though, intent is irrelevant. If you’re splicing different viruses together and then running experiments on them, you might accidentally create a Frankenstein virus that escapes from the lab and kills 20 million people. Fauci’s trying to create space for virologists to do tests that might tell us how dangerous viruses that may eventually arise in the wild might be. Paul’s countering that those tests could produce something more lethal than nature itself would be expected to produce anytime soon.

Paul’s slippery here too, though, in how he denies and then un-denies that he’s blaming Fauci for COVID. Initially he says that he isn’t: He understands that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID couldn’t have evolved from any known viruses in the possession of the Wuhan lab, including those involved in the EcoHealth experiment. But then he speculated that they were experimenting with undisclosed viruses as well and that one of those undisclosed chimeras may be SARS-CoV-2, unleashed on the world via a lab accident. He’s not blaming Fauci directly for that, but I guess the idea is that because NIH and EcoHealth provided Wuhan researchers with funds in the past to perfect their GOF technique or whatever, they unwittingly made possible the eventual fateful experiment that produced the chimera that causes COVID.

All of which remains unproven, of course. And although scientific opinion isn’t unanimous, I think Fauci’s right that the balance among virologists continues to favor a natural origin for the virus instead of a lab leak.

Where does that leave us? Nowhere closer to knowing what NIH did and didn’t know about GOF research in Wuhan. That’ll have to wait for the next Fauci/Paul exchange, assuming Paul doesn’t cut Fauci off again next time.

WATCH: Complete exchange between Sen. @RandPaul and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

FAUCI: "It makes me very uncomfortable to have to say something, but he is egregiously incorrect in what he says. Thank you."

PAUL: "History will figure that out on its own." pic.twitter.com/5R7Auaylzv

— CSPAN (@cspan) November 4, 2021