"Face the Nation" on March 5, 2023
Interview
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Thank you.
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I've seen quite a bit of intelligence, as you might imagine, sitting on the Intelligence Committee. We haven't seen all that we want to see necessarily. And some of it is very classified that I have seen. And so we have to continue driving forward and getting questions answered because the more we find, the more questions that we may have.
So, you do have a variety of opinions. And, really, what we are trying to do is to follow the breadcrumbs, if you will, look at the forensics of what took place. Obviously, this is one of the more serious things that has ever happened to mankind. And so it is important to find the origins of Covid.
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That -- there may come a time for that. I would hope that they do it willingly.
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I'm hoping, at the end of the day with the subcommittee, that we have a bipartisan product that can really help us with our readiness going into the future. I keep using a variety of terms that we want to be able to predict a pandemic, we want to prepare for a pandemic, we want to protect ourselves from a pandemic, and hopefully prevent a pandemic. And that should be our goal. And we're going to have to work with a lot of scientists and specialists to be able to do that. But we have to get to the truth of what actually happened in this pandemic.
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Well, it may be a combination of both at the end of the day. And I think it is important that we do that.
Look, if we were taking taxpayer dollars to fund research, not only in the United States but in China, concerning this type of methodology, the creation of a chimera, or it's called gain of function research, where you can take two viruses and put them into one, I don't see a whole lot of commercial use for that necessarily. So, it's something that if it's going to take place, it certainly should have oversight or should have had oversight.
In 2015, Ralph Baric of North Carolina, along with Dr. Zhengli Shi in China, published their article about the ability to create these chimeras. And they did that. So, we know that this technology exists.
My real question is, why are we doing this with an adversary like China? And we have to look into what the reasoning was for that, and what actually took place, where the money went, and why did it go there?
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Well, I think that's the goal. I mean, I just want to get to facts. And when I was asked to chair this select subcommittee, one of the first things I did was call Dr. Raul Ruiz, Democrat from California, emergency physician. As physicians, we have worked on many bills together and we get along very well. We may disagree on a lot of other policies, but we work very well together, especially when it comes to health.
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Well, I think we have a lot of serious members that -- on both sides of the aisle that are just after the truth. I think that they come from a variety of backgrounds.
Look, there were things that were said, hey, this is a conspiracy theory, stop this conspiracy theory that it may have come from the lab. Well, now you have agencies that are coming forward and saying that we do think it came from the lab.
Look, we have to conduct ourselves in a way that is professional, and I hope that we will. I can't control everybody.
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And that goes on both sides of the aisle. Dr. Ruiz can't either.
But, at the same time, what I'm seeing from all the members is that they have backgrounds of severe interests, significant interests. They either owned a business, they're health care providers, they're concerned about the adverse events that may come from the vaccine. These are legitimate things for Americans to be concerned about.
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And through this process, I think we took doctors out of the equation all too often and left it up to non-physicians to tell America how to treat themselves.
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Well, certainly. And any after action review or review of something that happened, if we see that there's some gaps in our safety, then we should take a look at that. Let's not put things out there that aren't necessarily facts and say that there was a safety issue if it wasn't. But, at the same time, you do want to address these issues.
Look, we're always trying to do better. I hope that we can. And the other thing that I would like to see come out of all this, especially with the one where there was such a chemical, toxic reaction with the fires that were started from the derailment is, do we have a standard operating procedure of how we manage a community, what our reaction is from the government, what are we looking for, how do we protect our people? Let's make sure that we have a good standard operating procedure so although these instances are rare, according to the numbers, we have to be prepared for that 0.1 percent or whatever the case may be.
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