Sen. Rand Paul to Lead First Ever Congressional Hearing on Gain-of-Function Research

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is set to lead the first congressional hearing on gain-of-function research as part of his ongoing efforts to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The hearing, scheduled for Aug. 3, comes amid intensifying Republican scrutiny on whether a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) caused the pandemic, as well as possible U.S. funding ties to the gain-of-function research at the facility. Gain-of-function involves enhancing a virus to make it more potent or transmissible.

Titled “Revisiting Gain-of-Function Research: What the Pandemic Taught Us and Where Do We Go From Here,” the hearing will be held by the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight, of which Paul is the ranking member.

An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei Province on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

More than two years since the emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, international efforts to investigate the origins of the pandemic have produced little, largely due to the Chinese regime’s persistent refusal to allow independent investigators to access crucial health data from the early stages of the pandemic and records from the WIV.

But the U.S. State Department and experts have flagged circumstantial evidence pointing to a lab leak from the WIV as a possible source of the pandemic, including evidence of WIV’s gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, reports that staff members became sick with symptoms consistent with both seasonal flu and COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, before the Chinese regime acknowledged the outbreak, and that a WIV public database of 22,000 samples and viral sequences was taken offline in September 2019 before the onset of the outbreak.

“Gain-of-function research has historically been supported by tax