Rand Paul: I Think Intel. Agencies Are Still Doing Gain of Function, 'They Won't Give Me Proper Oversight'

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) stated that he believes that American intelligence agencies are still doing gain of function research on monkeypox and he has been denied proper oversight of the issue.

Paul said, “To me, the most important thing is that we put scientists into a commission that oversee[s] gain of function research to make sure this doesn’t happen again. My goal is to have legislation here, but then to take our legislation in America and go to the Biological/Chemical Weapons Convention — this is a treaty of all the civilized countries — and try to convince them — you can’t make people do things — but civilized countries should be concerned about this as well. And we should try to work throughout the world to adopt standards, to say, hey. Because the big one they were experimenting on in 2010 is still something people talk about. It’s the avian flu, the bird flu. It can go from birds to humans, not very well, but it doesn’t go human to human. But if someone is setting up a lab and taking the avian flu and infecting mice with human cells and running it through over and over again, what you create is a virus that you have forced the evolution of to adapt to humans. That’s a terrible idea. And we should not be doing it.”

Later, he added, “I think that our intelligence agencies in our country are still doing this. They won’t give me proper oversight of this, but we believe that there are monkeypox experiments going on that are still gain of function. And monkeypox is containable at this point, but I don’t want them changing monkeypox to be more dangerous or spread in a different way.”

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