American Thought Leaders - Sen. Roger Marshall: US Must Stop Funding Dangerous Research with Communist China

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

In this episode, I sit down with Sen. Dr. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), an obstetrician and gynecologist, to get his take on gain of function research, the origins of the virus, and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.Dr. Marshall shares what he believes are the “smoking guns” that link the origins of the coronavirus to a lab leak in Wuhan, China.“If we’re funding this type of research in a place like Wuhan, China, where we know that the CCP military is working hand in glove with all those scientists, I mean ... this whole thing is a national security issue,” says Dr. Marshall. He argues all grants moving forward must be assessed for national security risks.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

If we're funding this type of research in a place like Wuhan, China, where we know that the CCP military is working hand in glove with all those scientists. I mean, this whole thing is a national security issue. And that's the questions they should have been asking Dr. Fauci today. In this episode, I sit down with Republican Senator Dr. Roger Marshall, an obstetrician and gynecologist from Kansas, to get his take on gain-of-function research, the origins of the virus, and Dr. Anthony Fauci's recent testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the

coronavirus pandemic. Somebody's lying here. It's either Dr. Fauci or David Marins. I think we should put some type of term limits on people in high positions, whether it's the FBI, the CDC, NIAID director, that they just accumulate too much power. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Senator Roger Marshall, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jan, we're going to have a great discussion today. I've been looking forward to this for weeks. Well, absolutely. And I just, you know, cut out a little bit early from the hearing where Dr. Anthony Fauci was testifying about COVID origins and some other things, as it turns out. I guess we managed to get about an hour and a half of the hearing in.

What are your reactions? Yeah. Well, look, Jan, somebody's lying. Somebody's lying here. It's either Dr. Fauci or David Morin. Somebody is lying. First of all, Fauci once again lies that we were not funding, we, the United States, was not funding gain-of-function research

when the NIH, the State Department, experts in the field all said we were funding gain-of-function research and we won China. And Fauci still can't look the camera in the eye and admit to that. And then he says that Moran's is lying, that he did not participate in any of these cover-up. And he's distancing himself. You can see Fauci very clearly trying to distance himself from David Moran's testimony. Even though he's been his number one assistant for 20 years, suddenly he's not a direct report anymore. Somebody out there is lying. So one of the things, you wrote an op-ed, which we ran in the Epoch Times on Sunday. You assert that he must have known about bioweapons development in China.

And so this is something that struck me here, because he's on record now saying, were you ever briefed that the U.S. State, by the U.S. State Department in 2005 issued warnings that the Chinese government was working on the creation of bioweapons. He says, I was not aware of that. Another one, did you ever discuss the Chinese bioweapons program with anyone in the intelligence community? He says, I never discussed the Chinese bioweapons program to my knowledge with anybody. I think it's his responsibility to know. And if he doesn't, then shame on him. He has, you know, he has two roles right now that he's being paid for. He's being paid for as the chief medical officer advisor, head of the NIAID for the president. But additionally,

he's the chief biodefense for the civilian world, the chief civilian biodefense person as well. He's getting paid a salary to do that. How could he not know? I mean, this has been well-sourced knowledge since at least the 1990s, what Russia and China were doing from a biosecurity offensive weapon. So I don't know how anybody at his level of the government wouldn't know this. And if he doesn't, then shame on him. What do you make of the overall questioning? Do you think we're going to get to the bottom of anything through this?

Yeah, it's going to be tough. He's really slippery. He's the slipperiest person I've ever seen. He acts like he's a 38-year experienced veteran in front of Congress members. But what we need to be focusing on is the process, the processes that he didn't follow through and the processes that are absolutely missing. Beyond Dr. Fauci, we need to be talking about what we need to do as a government in this world of gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research is code for bioweapon research. It really is the same thing. This is not two different issues.

So we need to focus on why isn't national security in on these decisions where we're doing grants? Why are we funding gain-of-function research with our adversaries, these countries? Why are we letting scientists from these countries of concern into our laboratories as well? Could you imagine if I walked in here and said, we just sent our best nuclear scientists to Iran and to North Korea yesterday? And they're over here too in our lab. Their scientists are in our lab. But for some reason with this gain of function research, people can't make the visual. And they don't understand that even though there's not a bomb going off, that gain of function research has resulted in

a hundred times, maybe a thousand times more deaths than nuclear bombs ever did. So we need to put it in that perspective. Where's the national security emphasis of this? And it's very clear if we're funding this type of research in a place like Wuhan, China, where we know that the CCP military is working hand in glove with all those scientists. I mean, for crying out loud, the CCP labs are making the fentanyl precursors that come over here. It's not like in America, where you have Kansas State's research laboratory over here and then the Fort Detreat's research laboratory over here. They're all in the same place. So we need to bring in this national security issue into all these grants that we're funding.

Just if you can clarify for me, you said that, you know, bioweapons research has resulted in, I think you said, a thousand times more deaths than nuclear bombs. And just can you clarify, explain that to me a little bit? Yeah, well, I think that COVID-19 is a result of gain of function in the potential to be a biosecurity weapon. You know, why are they making a virus that's this horrific, that sticks to human lung cells like glue? You know, it was very specifically designed. They could say, oh, we were going to make lung cells like glue. It was very specifically designed. They could say, oh, we were going to make a vaccine for it. But I just don't see why you'd be making this particular virus, which doesn't occur in nature for the purpose of making a vaccine out of it.

I can't make that connection. And that's the problem with gain-of-function research. What we would like to outlaw is anything that's being made for a bad purpose. You know, Fauci in his comments today, it's crazy. He's saying, oh, if you expand the gain of function definition, we couldn't do research on a flu vaccine. What a horrible lie that is to tell the American public. That's not true at all. Well, yeah. So they would, of course, say that it's all about preparing for future pandemics, right? Well, two points.

One is, of course, there's this doctrine of military-civil fusion in China. So anything with the potential for a military potential has this kind of requirement that there is, I guess, cooperation or at least conversation about the potentials. And we know that, of course, the Chinese military was working in the Wuhan lab, and that's known as a fact. I suspect someone like Dr. Anthony Fauci would say, well, because we don't know what's going to happen in the future. We have no idea. So we're going to go in the lab. We're going to tweak things to make them highly infectious to

humans so we can create the countermeasures. And that way, on the one side, we're protecting against random mutations. On the other side, we're figuring out how we can deal with potential bioweapons that are deployed against us. That's what they say. So they would say, well, there's nothing bad about this. So as a physician, I'm always saying they're balancing the benefit to the risk. So for 30 years, they've been saying, if you allow us to do this research, we'll develop a vaccine that's going to save the earth. And they're over 30 years so far. But in the process, we've had multiple lab leaks, right?

Even lab leaks here in the United States from our gain of function research as well for decades. That's why the Obama administration shut down gain of function research. But somehow Fauci's always found a way around it was because of our own lab leaks. So I understand the potential gain, but until you put the proper guardrails around it, the downside is just too horrible right now. And again, why would we be over there teaching them how to do this? I mean, let's back up. Ralph Baric in North Carolina taught Dr. Shi how to do the protein spike.

He then gave her the humanized mice that could use their, had the ACE2 receptors as well. He taught them how to do this. Now, I trusted Dr. Ralph Baric, a good professor, teacher, scientist from North Carolina, but we're in bed with the enemy right now. We're sleeping with the enemy, and I don't trust him. I remember President Reagan, trust but verify. This doesn't apply just to nuclear weapons. This whole thing is a national security issue. We have to trust but verify. EcoHealth was just a funneling mechanism money. We gave EcoHealth $150 million or some 20 years preceding COVID,

and they're funneling in different directions, but they have no scientists at the web. They have no idea what they were doing there, and I think that's breaking the law, too. I think the law says, the grant requirements say, you have to have proper control of what's going on, eyes on. That's the questions they should have been asking Dr. Fauci today. Dr. Fauci, did USAID have anybody there in Wuhan supervising, participating in this?

No. The answer was no, nobody, nothing. Even after this epidemic explodes, we can't get researchers in there to do any research. They won't give us the DNA virus. Dr. Fauci, what was the upside of doing research with Wuhan, China right now? There's no upside to this. Yeah. So you were already in 2020 starting to ask questions. I guess you're very passionate about this issue. Is this what you were already thinking?

What were you thinking back in 2020? That's a great question. It seems like forever ago, but it was yesterday. I read two or three hours every day. I'm very intellectually curious. Early January, the first week of January, I read about this novel virus in China. And I'm a physician. I'm sitting there thinking, I mean to talk, think to my mind about SARS and MERS and Ebola. And I thought, you know, SARS was in China. And what did China do then?

They obfuscated from the very beginning. They underestimated. They didn't share with anybody where it came from, what was going on as well. And I said, holy cow, you know, I'm not just responsible for my OB patients anymore. I'm the congressman from Kansas. I'm running for Senate. I have a big responsibility. I better look into this. So the next thing I do is I start researching what's in Wuhan, China. A BSL, a biosecurity level four lab in Wuhan, China. What are the chances? And then you could just tell already that China was hiding. Well, what were they hiding? Why wouldn't they just give us the DNA sequence? And then all of a sudden through different doctors reaching out to me saying, something's up, something's up. We can't get the information out of China. And all of a sudden,

China is saying there's no human to human transmission. Like wow, by the end of January we got people in Thailand, Japan, Taiwan with this virus, but there's no human to human transmission. That made no sense to me as well. There's an article I think in the Wall Street Journal that says, don't worry, we have CDC scientists in Wuhan looking into this. I get the CDC on the phone and say, what are you guys finding? Well, we've got scientists in China, but they're not in Wuhan. They won't let us within a thousand miles of it. So they lied. They had scientists in China. That's like saying you're

reviewing a hurricane in Florida and you sent your scientist to Washington State or something, right? So it just never added up to me. You've done these stories like this. You kept looking for a dead end, but I bet, Jan, every time you dove into something, didn't you find four more open doors that say, oh, you need to look here, here, and I'm still there. Every time I peel back a layer of this onion, there's more there. It just never ends.

Well, so this is one of the things that's more there. It just never ends. Well, so, you know, this is one of the things that's come out. We, of course, published a documentary, I think it was April of 2020, where we tried to put together kind of what we knew. What was the more likely scenario? I mean, that was really kind of the question that we were asking, given all the information that was available by that point. I think we did have the sequence at that point, and there's this suspicious furin cleavage site that you don't find in such viruses and that typically you used to facilitate human transmission.

Anyway, we put it all together in a basic way. I think it's aged incredibly well. What have we discovered since that time? What do we know? Like maybe you can outline a few of the sort of the key, most important facts. Yeah. You know, like you, I was making my timelines and my theories back in April, May of that year as well. People can go to marshall.senate.gov and see a 15 minute video we did on the timeline several years ago. I would just talk through what I call the smoking guns. It was a great time to talk about that.

Things that you and I were postulating then, I think most importantly is that we've proven them and we've added more pieces to it. When I think about seven, eight smoking guns that would show that this virus was made by a laboratory in Wuhan and leaked there as well, I don't think it was purposely released. I think that would be, not even China, the CCP would do that. But we already mentioned just the geography. What are the questions of this virus showing up next to a BSL level four laboratory? In April, you and I are sitting there wondering about an intermediate animal yet, an intermediate species. And it was only four months into it. But here we are four years later, and there's no intermediate species. Remind your listeners that SARS was about 2002, something like that, 2002.

It took them like four or five months to find the civet cat that was the intermediate species. So the virus went from the bats to the civet cat, and then the humans. In the MERS epidemic of 2012, it was the camel. So we still don't have this intermediate host. Next, the next smoking gun is a progenitor. China could have easily have shown some type of progenitor, the father, the grandfather, the great uncle of this virus, as it emerged from a bat into humans. They should have had an intermediate host and they should have found all these sequences. But the next smoking gun, well, Dr. Shi, of course, took down her viral DNA laboratory in September of 2019, which is why I believe there was actually

two leaks from the laboratory, the first one in September of 2019. And then next, she destroys all these virus samples, the eight viruses that were probably closest to the backbone of COVID-19. She destroyed those as well. Now we found out also that they were doing research on a vaccine in November of 2019. So you and I probably didn't know that in April. I don't think I figured that out till later as well. And then, the number of people that have mysteriously died that knew something about this, they jailed journalists, they jailed physicians and scientists, and certainly some had some very suspicious ends to their lives as well. I think all these little pieces of the puzzle, and just talk just for a second about the DNA sequence of this. And you

have a molecular biology background, so help me communicate this effectively. We mentioned the protein spike, very unique to this project, right? The protein spike. You mentioned the furin cleavage site. It's not in this type of virus. And then lastly, no one's talking about this, but there's a sequence upstream from the furron Cleavage site. It's called QTQTN, and that's what sets down your immune system. So we didn't know that then. We didn't know how this virus worked. So those are pieces.

And then the other thing I would add we didn't know then was the diffuse lab application, the grant application to the DoD. So this diffuse grant from EcoHealth basically requested money to do what ends up being the COVID-19 project. I mean, what are the chances? You describe all these different smoking guns, but I think the diffuse proposal seems to be the big one because it almost is like a blueprint on how one would create such a virus and so forth. Let's go back to this hearing that's happening today. So what would you hope can come from the work of this select committee on the coronavirus? Yeah, again, we've got to stop making it so personal with Dr. Fauci and focus on what we need to do to correct the system. And I think that that's what's missing in the questions.

Look, when this virus broke out, we had a plan for a pandemic. ASPR, the Assistant HHS Secretary, Dr. Bob Cadillac, should have been leading the charge on this. We had a plan to respond to a pandemic. Dr. Robert Redfield, maybe the wisest man I have met in decades. Those two get pushed to the side, and Fauci, instead of asking advice from scientists within the government, he reaches out to his gain-of-function mafia. If you think about the people he should have been reaching out to, a couple organizations in the government. One is MBIC, and that's the bioscience intelligence community within the agency, within the government. And the other one is the NCMI, which is the medical intelligence within the government. He should have been reaching out to the FBI. In his testimony today,

someone asked him, who should have he reached out to? I would have reached out to all. The State Department had incredible incriminating evidence, even before January 1st, 2020, on what was going on in China, all these suspicious happenings going on in the city. And the city becomes, during the military games, becomes vacant, a whole bunch of just coincidental pieces of the puzzle. But instead,

Fauci centralizes it, and he consults with his viral gain-of-function mafia, the people that were going to get $2 billion of grants over a two-year time frame. Their institution's got $2 billion worth of grants from Anthony Fauci, NIH, the federal government as well. So why did he reach out to those people rather than their proper channels? Well, he actually responded to that, I believe, in the testimony today, right? He said he wanted, he asked them to convene a group of evolutionary biologists to assess the veracity, the significance of this cure and cleavage site. This is the February 1st meeting. Before that, Christian Anderson and Eddie Holmes had come to Dr. Fauci, two premier virologists in the world studying this, and said, we think that this came from

the laboratory. This is before February 1st. Fauci says, okay, let's convene this meeting. In a matter of days, he flips the whole script. Just a week after that meeting, Fauci is on a podcast, on Newt Gingrich podcast, and he's got, who's he got with him? Peter Dasik, of all people, are on there saying, oh, there's no way that this could have come from a laboratory. So to me, again, just this whole trail of crumbs saying, my gosh, why is Fauci so motivated to hide this? Why doesn't he even give it the possibility this could have came from a laboratory? So something you mentioned in your op-ed that's relevant to this meeting that you just described is the Federal Advisory Committee Act. And this is

something you want specifically targeted in discussions with Fauci or elsewhere. Explain that to me. Yeah. so this Federal Advisory Act says, if someone in the government is seeking counsel, they need to do it very transparently, as well as being people that aren't prejudiced, that don't have a conflict of interest. And this is exactly the opposite of what Dr. Fauci did. Instead of going to the government agencies

I talked about, the intelligence community, the State Department, the DOD, instead he went to these people that are beholding unto him. People that he literally was giving billions of dollars of grants to in total. He didn't follow the process. If I learn one thing as a physician, whether it's a cord prolapse or a placental ab know, have a plan and go at it the same way every time. So they just dodged the plan completely for some reason. Our response to a pandemic was dodged. One thing that seemed to be clear to me looking at this testimony that was happening or this hearing in general is that there seems to be a bipartisan interest in holding Dr. Morenz and Dr. Daszak accountable for something.

I don't know if you read it that way as well as I did, but it seems like that. But in general, aside from accountability, you have to make sure that this sort of situation doesn't happen again. How do we do that? I mean, my reflection on the hearing today is we took two steps back. And you brought this out. This turned into a more of a bipartisan, a more of a partisan hearing, excuse me, where the Democrats are basically applauding Lord Fauci and the Republicans trying to find somebody accountable. The last hearing more agreed that David Morin is the culprit here and Peter Daszak and EcoHealth are the culprit here.

And I think there's been a very concerted effort by the insiders and NIH to throw those two under the bus. I absolutely think that that's what's going on here. It is so hard to walk away from the politics. And I don't get this. I get so frustrated to me.'s going on here. It is so hard to walk away from the politics, and I don't get this. I get so frustrated. To me, this is about health. It's the health of millions of people. A million Americans have died. We have 10,000, 15,000 Americans with long COVID that are incapacitated right now, and we still don't have all the truth.

You know, if an airplane wrecks, we go to great lengths to find out why, how come. So we need a 9-11 style, deep, full-throated forensic investigation. Take the investigation out of D.C., for crying out loud. Let's get the politics out of it. Take it to Kansas. Take it somewhere else and do a full-throated forensic investigation of this and see and learn from our mistakes. And then I think the ideas that we're throwing

around are different types of legislation. Legislation number one is NIAID needs its own inspector general. Okay, they don't have an inspector general. Next in all the grant process, they need to bring in national security. I think we should put some type of term limits on people like Dr. Fauci, people in high positions, whether it's the FBI, the CDC, AID director, that they just accumulate too much power. Not even amending to the problems with this six-foot social distancing. My gosh, I called the CDC on that live when they issued that. I said, show me the studies. They sent me almost 100 studies. I went through every one of them. And the only study even close to having anything to do with this was a 1930s article on tuberculosis which talked about how far the tuberculin bacteria would spew when you coughed or you spit.

And considering that versus this COVID virus is like considering not an apple to an orange, but an apple to a watermelon, that the tuberculin particle is so big. The mask mandates, the same thing. They sent me articles on mask mandate, over probably a hundred of them. Eighty of them said the mask didn't matter. Ten percent of them said it made it worse, which I believe that. And then ten percent said maybe it helps, but they weren't peer reviewed. There was no science.

I get pretty frustrated when a physician presents something as dogma when it's really theory and just this lack of humbleness to say, I need consultations, I need help. And the solution that's going to work in New York City may be different than what's going to work in my home of Great Bend, Kansas. Talking about conflicts of interest, this is something you mentioned that needs to be dealt with. One of the revelations recently is that it's about $700 million of royalties went to NIH scientists. This is Adam Andrzejewski over at OpenTheBooks.com. Dr. Varchi was asked about this. He said that he had gotten zero of that. What do you think about this idea of large

amounts of royalties? By the way, this is just during the COVID era, I guess. Right. So first of all, we've discussed this for months at my office, and there's a solution to it. Look, these researchers, scientists need to list royalties. And I'm not sure where or how, but much like I have to report every investment I make as a senator, these folks that work for the federal government, they get royalties or anything close to what you would call a royalty that you or your family members are getting. It is that simple. We need a law that says that. I don't want any wiggle room.

So I think we're getting the lawyers involved now to take the concept and then put it into some type of writing. That idea we need inspector generals at the USAID, we need royalties, public transparency. You just can't shine enough light on this stuff evidently. Talking about shining light, what about the FOIA process? How do we put teeth to it? I'm just baffled that from day one, we as Congress have asked for information. We even passed a law that Biden signed asking to declassify lots of this information, and they still haven't gotten it to us.

This is the swamp up here in D.C., that there are federal officials, bureaucrats like Fauci, that have more power and control than a United States senator does. And I think I go back to the term limits issue. It goes way beyond just writing laws. There needs to be some housecleaning up here. But I couldn't be more frustrated. You're saying it has to be something more than just passing laws and there has to be some housecleaning. But what does that look like? I guess I'm curious. I think it looks like a Donald Trump up here kicking ass and taking names and just saying the end of this. I do think that term limits at a certain level in the federal government will help.

But it's going to take some very brave congressmen and senators to stand up to these people and start clipping their budgets one way or another. And I would just tell you this. I know we have people up here concerned about the size of the Chinese Navy. I have more concern about their cyber attacks, their biosecurity attacks, those things you can't see that I knew the size of their Navy. I think it's very real. And, you know, that's why we have a BSL-4 laboratory at Kansas State University right now is to try to be prepared for some of those biosecurity attacks. It's quite a challenge. I mean, what we're seeing right now with the

highly contagious avian flu going across the country right now, we found it in dairies in Kansas. There's two or three humans now that have it as well. You know, where did that virus come from? Why is it suddenly acting meaner? You know? I'm very suspicious, but it does take a scientific response at some level to try to battle it. It's a great question, though. The blueprints to making avian flu more transmissible to humans actually were published, I think, back in 2012 or 2014. I don't remember exactly. And that was actually the reason for this gain-of-function moratorium with caveats, gain-of-function moratorium with caveats, as we learned subsequently in the first place.

So, I mean, it seems to be out there, how to make it. That scares me a lot to know that people are publishing things like this. So let's talk about the national security side, collaborations with communist China on, well, sure, gain-of-function research would be one example. I think you've made your case pretty clear on that. But just in general, in biotechnology, and frankly, other types of technology

which has military potential. I'm done. I'm absolutely done. I came to Congress with an open mind. Think about what China does here. They steal $500 billion worth of intellectual property from us every year. They don't respect intellectual property. If you discover oil in your backyard, they think it's theirs. It's just a different philosophy.

So I don't trust him a bit. Well, it's interesting that you say that, but I remember Secretary of State Pompeo back in the day had this maxim. He said, you know, distrust and verify, right? It's sort of a play on trust but verify, right, from Ronald Reagan back in the day. But if you see the same pattern again and again, you sort of have to kind of assume that that might be the pattern next. Is that what you're getting at? You got it.

Why would you do, you don't do business with someone that was dishonest with you before. You know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Let's, you know, just the bigger picture here. 90% of the counterfeits that come into this country are made in China. 90% of the counterfeits that come into this country are made in China. 90% of the fentanyl precursors made in CCP labs coming into this country as well.

We mentioned intellectual property theft. The cyber attacks. I sit in these financial institutions and see the cyber attacks coming over more than a dozen per second. They're all coming from four or five, actually two or three countries, from Russia and China and typically North Korea. What else do we need to see here? Why would we cooperate with them? So, you know, as we finish up, you know, you mentioned term limits for government bureaucrats. What about for congressional members? Absolutely. I'm all for it. It's one of the first things I signed up for. But it wouldn't be fair for Kansas to have term limits and the other states not. That's my caveat is. But if there was ever an opportunity to vote for that, we could argue, you know, a senator probably two terms is a house three or four. I don't know. But I would be all for it. Okay. Any final thoughts

as we actually finish? Until someone can convince me that it's safe, America needs to, at a very minimum, stop funding gain-of-function research, which I think is much more dangerous than nuclear bombs are at this point in time. We should stop funding it with adversaries. We shouldn't be giving them any more of our technology. And to a point that, from a conversation you and I had earlier, though, is if they're going to continue their research, we have to figure out where and what we're going to do here so that they don't get ahead of us. So I acknowledge that. But it's going to take some very thoughtful people to put the proper guardrails around how we're going to do that research. But we cannot be doing this research with our adversaries. Senator Roger Marshall, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.

I enjoyed it, Jan. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Senator Roger Marshall and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.