Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo voiced warnings to the public over the weekend that the Wuhan Institute of Virology remains functional and that controversial activity may have happened there.
“I’m very worried that this stuff still goes on and that the U.S. government’s been funding it,” Paul said in an appearance on Fox.
Last week, an amendment introduced by Paul to ban the use of U.S. tax dollars to fund “gain-of-function” research in China passed in the Senate, with every Democrat voting in favor of it. This unanimous vote led Paul to think that they either have relevant information or that the information pointing at the theory of the virus coming out from the lab will grow stronger.
“A year ago, anybody who mentioned the possibility that this virus came out of the Wuhan lab was dismissed as crazy right-wing kooks, [or] conspiracy theorists,” Paul said, but that now “you have the left starting to wonder about it, and when I introduced my amendment to say we should quit funding this research in China, it ended up getting every Democrat on board.”
He continued: “Last week’s revelation that three workers in the Wuhan lab were sick with a COVID-like illness in November well before the Chinese admit—this is a big deal, and so I think nobody is denying anymore the possibility—we don’t know for certain, but we’ve got a lot of evidence pointing to this lab now.”
On a separate appearance on the news network, Pompeo said that there is a connection between the lab and the Chinese military and that the Wuhan lab is still functioning, possibly engaging in the same type of experiments.
“What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts connected to the People’s Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research. They refuse to tell us what it was, they refuse to describe the nature of either of those, they refused to allow access to the World Health Organization when it tried to get in there.”