"The only thing we were lucky with COVID is that the death rate was 0.3%, which was still a lot of people and I don't want to downplay that," Paul said on Newsmax's "National Report." "But they're working with viruses in the lab that have 5% to 50% mortality. If a virus escapes with 50% mortality, it'll be worse than the Black Plague in the 14th century when a third of Europe died.

"If a third of America dies or a third of the world dies, there will not be potable water. There won't be chlorine in the water. There won't be the ability to feed people; there will be war and rioting in the streets, and there won't be enough food and the society would descend into chaos if half the people died on the planet." //

Paul said that although the United States has stopped funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, "there is still funding going on in other parts of China."

"To my knowledge, there's still subcontracts that go through American universities to military research in China," he said. "So, all of the money we send to China should stop. May not make them stop doing this crazy research, but that should stop."

Beyond that, there are "at least 12 different laboratories in the United States doing gain of function research," Paul said. //

while the First World War was a war of chemists, and the Second World War was a war of physicists, the next global war may well be a war of biologists. And if it is, it has the potential to make the Black Death look like the sniffles.