Fmr Testing Czar Brett Giroir Slams Fauci for Calling Rand Paul a Liar: Gain of Function Research Questions ‘Deserve to be Answered’

Former Trump administration coronavirus testing czar Brett Giroir criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci over his explosive exchange with Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) while he was threatening Fauci with prison.

Giroir appeared Wednesday on Fox & Friends to weigh in on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing where Fauci was questioned on whether he funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Giroir called it “a concerning exchange” before accusing Fauci of “hiding behind a technical definition” in order to deny that the National Institutes of Health provided a funding grant for this kind of research.

“What they did fund was exactly what Rand Paul said,” Giroir said. “They funded researchers to go hundreds of miles away into the back of bat caves, extract dangerous viruses from bats that have never been seen by humans before, and bring them to a city of 10 million people in the Wuhan lab. Next, they chopped up those viruses and created new Frankenstein viruses to see if they could infect human cells. That may not technically be ‘gain of function research,’ but it’s dangerous research, and Senator Paul’s questions deserve to be answered.”

During the Senate hearing, Paul claimed that Fauci committed a federal crime of lying to Congress by denying that the NIH provided the Wuhan Institute a grant under his watch for research on how to make viruses more transmissible. This led to an angry back and forth between Paul and Fauci as the latter accused the senator of lying, and Fauci also denied the insinuation that he funded gain of function research that led to the coronavirus pandemic.

Giroir said that Paul asked “legitimate questions” at the hearing and “I don’t think we got a legitimate answer.” This prompted Brian Kilmeade to ask “Have you ever seen him so rattled or inappropriate in a Senate hearing?”

“No, I really haven’t,” Giroir answered. “He is usually pretty cool in those hearings. And I was really concerned because I don’t think that posture was good for him, good for the hearing, or go to inspire confidence in the American people…I have never, ever seen — and I hope it never happens again — that a witness who is a public health official calls a U.S. Senator a liar and doesn’t know what he was talking about when clearly Senator Paul read the paper and had important points to be made.”

Giroir concluded by once again saying the NIH provided funding for “dangerous research,” though he expressed uncertainty about whether it meets their definition of gain of function research.

Watch above, via Fox News.

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