US Senator Rand Paul has received death threats after challenging the White House chief medical adviser over the alleged man-made origins of COVID-19.
The outspoken Kentucky senator has seized on the release of thousands of emails from presidential Chief Medical Adviser Dr Anthony Fauci, saying they show he bore "moral culpability" for the pandemic.
“This week, I’ve had five death threats just for being outspoken on it”, he told Fox News on Friday night.
“I don’t know what the world’s coming to", Paul continued. "You can’t ask honest, difficult questions that in the end have proved out that Dr Fauci was not being honest with us, but as a repercussion, my family had white powder sent to our house, and five death threats phoned in”.
Paul was referring in part to an incident two weeks ago, when he received a package containing an unidentified white substance and a threatening message.
The image on the outside of the envelope had a picture of the senator in bandages with an emblematic firearm pointed to his head, Fox News reported. Under the picture there was a threat printed, saying "I’ll finish what your neighbour started you motherf*****" — a reference to an incident when Paul was attacked by a neighbour.
Fauci's role in managing the pandemic has come under renewed scrutiny since his emails were published. He admits in one message that he and other experts found the COVID-19 genetic code "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory", implying it was genetically-engineered.
On Wednesday, Paul told Fox News that $600,000 in National Institute of Health funding approved by Fauci to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China was used for "gain-of-function" research that some scientists say could have created the deadly coronavirus strain.
"It's clearly 'gain-of-function'. There are several scientists who are in this field, cellular biologists, they all say that taking a SARS virus and adding an S-protein to it to make it infect human cells, that is the very definition of gain-of-function", the senator said. "It's very dangerous. We shouldn't be doing it here or there. But Dr Fauci has denied it to this day".
President Joe Biden made a point of re-appointing Fauci, who was heavily criticised by his predecessor Donald Trump when he served in the same role in his administration.