Paul has been one of few leaders in Congress pressing for a hearing on the origins of COVID-19. Last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) admitted its efforts to fund gain-of-function research on bats infected with coronaviruses at a lab in Wuhan, China, before COVID-19 spread out and forever changed life around the world.
"Not only do we need restrictions in our country," Paul told Fox News Digital in an interview of the research method. "I'm going to be advocating for an international convention of civilized countries to come together and discuss gain-of-function research and the potential harm it could cause on a global scale."
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"The chances are that [COVID-19] came from the lab — and…we're up to approximately six to seven million people dead throughout the world now — and this with about 1% mortality. If the next virus that gets out has a 15% or 50% mortality…we essentially destroy the underpinnings of civilization," Paul said.
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Gain-of-function research involves pulling viruses from animals to artificially engineer in a laboratory to make them more contagious and deadly to humans. The purpose of such research is to let scientists get ahead of the curb in developing treatments for certain contagious diseases.
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Demands for answers regarding the origins of the virus, which is assumed to have developed in Wuhan in November 2019, have led to demands for White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci's resignation and a general feeling of mistrust between some citizens and government leaders.
Fauci has previously denied U.S. involvement in gain-of-function research at a Wuhan research lab called the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has probed in its search for answers regarding COVID-19's origins.
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Nevertheless, a $600,000 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci serves as director, went to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, which then paid the Wuhan lab to study the risk that bat coronaviruses could infect humans. NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak previously accused EcoHealth Alliance of not being transparent about the work that was taking place in the lab.
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For months in 2020, China barred WHO investigators from entering Wuhan. The global health agency finally arrived in mid-January of 2021 and released initial findings a month later stating that it was "extremely unlikely" the virus came from a lab and advised "future studies." The organization said later in July 2021 that it would correct multiple errors in its initial report.
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