WATCH: Senate Chamber Erupts In Cheers After Passing Sen. Paul’s Amendment To Ban Funding Chinese Gain-Of-Function Research

The Senate chamber erupted in cheers Tuesday after unanimously passing an amendment introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to ban U.S. taxpayer funding for gain-of-function research in China.

Senate Amendment 2003, which was added to the bipartisan Endless Frontier Act, bans the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and any other U.S. agency from funding any Chinese gain-of-function research, which is a form of study that attempts to render pathogens more infectious and lethal. Paul’s amendment joined another introduced by Sens. Joni Ernst (R-IA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Ron Johnson (R-WI) that permanently prohibits U.S. funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“We may never know whether the pandemic arose from the lab in Wuhan, but we do know that so far no intermediate animal host has been discovered,” Paul said in a speech on the Senate floor. “Thousands of animals at the wet market have been looked at, none of them have carried COVID-19. We’ve tried to infect COVID-19 into bats, it doesn’t grow well in bats. It seems most adapted and suitable for humans.”

“We may not know whether this rose out of a Wuhan lab, but I think gain-of-function research — where we take a deadly virus, sometimes much more deadly than COVID, and then we increase its transmissibility to mammals — is wrong. In 2014, NIH stopped all of this research. I’m using the same definition to say any gain-of-function research should not be funded in China with U.S. taxpayer dollars, and I recommend a yes vote,” Paul added.

Paul’s amendment passed unanimously by a voice vote, after which some in the Senate chamber cheered.

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