Clive Peedell

Statement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National Associations

🚨 BREAKING: Rand Paul announces the committee will be voting to hold Dr. Fauci in CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS after Fauci invokes the fifth amendment over 80 times This carries up to a YEAR of prison time. Paul argues that Fauci does NOT have a fifth amendment right against self-incrimination, as Biden's autopen pardon protects him. Therefore, Fauci can be COMPELLED to answer questions. PAUL: "My question was limited to the period of your pardon only. I find your objection UNSUPPORTED and DIRECT YOU to answer the question." FAUCI: *pleads fifth* PAUL: "Because you refuse to answer citing a privilege unsupported because of your pardon and after being denied to do so this committee has scheduled a vote next week on a resolution certifying your contempt"

I believe the available evidence overwhelmingly points toward a research-related incident in Wuhan as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. government provided a relatively small amount of funding connected to research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the work explicitly authorized under those grants could not, by itself, have produced SARS-CoV-2. But money is fungible, and the deeper problem was that we were funding research in an institution where we lacked full transparency into what research was being conducted, by whom, and under what conditions. We should never make that mistake again. This matters as we consider broader scientific engagement with China. Collaboration can be enormously valuable, but only when there are enforceable standards of transparency, accountability, biosafety, and access to information. The relationship between scientists, research institutions, and the state in China is fundamentally different from what exists in open democratic societies. We cannot pretend otherwise. I also believe Dr. Anthony Fauci was wrong to argue so forcefully in the early months of the pandemic that the evidence favored a natural origin. As a Democrat and former member of a WHO expert advisory committee, it was clear to me in early 2020 that no one outside China had enough reliable information to reach a confident conclusion about origins. I believed then, as I do now, that a research-related origin demanded serious investigation. But accountability is not the same as vilification. Dr. Fauci has devoted his career to public health, and his work has helped save millions of lives around the world. He does not deserve the abuse and partisan attacks directed at him in today’s Senate hearing. He does deserve, like every official involved in the pandemic response, rigorous scrutiny of decisions that may have been mistaken. The Chinese government bears overwhelming responsibility for obstructing the world’s ability to understand how this catastrophe began, and that must remain the central focus of any serious origins investigation. But examining China’s failures cannot absolve us of examining our own. We should not have funded potentially risky research in laboratories where we could not demand full transparency, and U.S. officials should not have expressed confidence about pandemic origins that the available evidence did not justify. For six years, I have called for a bipartisan national commission on COVID-19. We still need one. I served as the lead Democrat on the Heritage Foundation’s COVID-19 commission, chaired by John Ratcliffe. That work can provide a starting point, but it cannot substitute for the comprehensive national reckoning we still have not had. Five years after the pandemic ended millions of lives and transformed billions more, this should not be about protecting political tribes, institutions, or reputations. It should be about finding the truth. We need to over every stone, follow the evidence wherever it leads, learn from China’s failures and our own, and then use those lessons to prepare for the next pandemic—which could be far worse than COVID-19 and could arrive sooner than we think.

DeSantis: This is a guy who, you know, is very much responsible for covid in the first place…