‘If anybody is lying here, it is you’: Fauci turns tables on inquisitor Rand Paul

Anthony Fauci has a reputation for plain speaking, as a senator who accused him of lying discovered to his cost on Tuesday.

A congressional hearing on the coronavirus pandemic was electrified when Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, clashed with Rand Paul, a Republican senator for Kentucky and longtime opponent of mask-wearing.

Paul suggested that Fauci had lied before Congress in May when he denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded so-called “gain of function” research – the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world – at a virology lab in Wuhan, China.