The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, is stepping down, but retirement won’t end one physician-turned-senator’s quest for answers about the role he played in Communist China’s weaponizing of viruses.

“Fauci’s resignation,” the junior senator of Kentucky, Republican Rand Paul, tweeted, “will not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic.” He promised the doctor “will be asked to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the lab leak.”

During a March 2021 discussion, the former task force lead investigator on Covid-19’s beginnings, David Asher, gave credence to the theory that it leaked from Beijing’s Wuhan lab by pointing out the pandemic’s manifest benefits to Beijing.

“You’ve taken out 15 to 20 percent of global GDP. You’ve killed millions of people. The Chinese population has been barely affected. Their economy has roared back to being number one in the entire G20.” 

Dr. Paul put the costs in starker terms in an August 4 interview on the “Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.” “They about destroyed our country. The massive inflation that we’re experiencing now is because of the lockdown and all the checks that were passed out.” 

On the same program, Dr. Paul said Monday, “The origins of the virus are very important, not just for culpability, not just because [Dr. Fauci] funded the lab where this virus in all likelihood originated.

“But it’s important because we need to get to the bottom of trying to prevent something like this from happening again.”

Dr. Paul has been advocating for hearings on gain-of-function research — tampering with viruses to make them spread faster and kill quicker — since the earliest days of the pandemic.

“I finally got a hearing in a subcommittee,” he said of testimony earlier this month, “and none of the Democrats came. It’s hard for me to imagine why they would have no curiosity as to where this virus came from.”

Communist China’s role in Covid-19 is of vital interest to national security, since President Biden is set to meet his counterpart face-to-face for the first time in November and must be armed with the facts to confront him.

Dr. Paul warned that while Covid-19 had a mortality rate of 1 percent or less, Beijing is experimenting on viruses that have 50 percent mortality, and maybe even with Nipah, which kills as many as 6 in 10.

“If you’re monkeying around with that,” he said, “and trying to make it aerosolized or trying to make it more transmissible, it’s a death wish for civilization.”

Dr. Fauci has long denied funding this weaponization, but three scientists — Richard Elbright, Steven Quay, and Keven Esvelt — testified about its dangers before Dr. Paul’s committee.

All of them, according to Dr. Paul, said that we should be “treating this type of research the same way we treat nuclear secrets” or it could be “devastating for the world.”

While he didn’t respond to a request for comment, Dr. Fauci has welcomed investigation in previous confrontations with Dr. Paul on Capitol Hill. 

“My records are an open book,” he said, dismissing claims against him about gain-of-function research as “bizarre.”

Now, though, he has timed his resignation as America’s highest paid public employee just days before a Republican Senate could be sworn into office — meaning Dr. Paul heading a committee with oversight powers.

“I thought for some time,” Dr. Paul told Mr. Travis, “that he will flee as soon as he thinks that he’ll be given accurate and pointed questions.

“And I think he won’t want to stand up to the scrutiny. But the thing is, even out of public service, he can be subpoenaed, and I say absolutely we should.”

Dr. Paul will keep digging, but it’s already clear that working hand-in-glove with Beijing to manufacture tools of death has been foolhardy on Dr. Fauci’s watch.

Because even if they didn’t unleash yesterday’s pandemic, they just might give it a try tomorrow with one like Nipah — and that would be, as a recent Sun headline put it, “Deja-Flu,” with a death toll that makes Covid-19 look like the sniffles.