Republican lawmakers have intensified their calls for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be fired after he defended the flow of $600,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, the lab at the heart of the controversy over the still-unexplained origins of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.
Fauci, director of the NIH, said in testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health & Human Services on May 25 that it would’ve been “almost a dereliction of our duty” for the NIH not to collaborate with Chinese scientists to study how the virus might jump from animals to humans.
He insisted that the NIH didn’t fund so-called gain-of-function research, which he defined as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic to humans,” at the Wuhan lab, claiming that the purpose of the $600,000 grant “was to study the animal-human interface, to do surveillance, and to determine if these bat viruses were even capable of transmitting infection to humans.”
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci testifies to a House panel in Washington on April 15, 2021. (Amr Alfiky/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Fauci was further pressed about the matter during a Senate hearing on May 26, with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) questioning Fauci’s faith in the Wuhan lab’s scientists, whom Fauci called “very respectable” just one day prior.
“How do you know they didn’t lie to you and use the money for gain-of-function research anyway?” Kennedy asked Fauci.
Fauci acknowledged he couldn’t be certain whether the money was used against its intended purpose.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci testifies to a House panel in Washington on April 15, 2021. (Amr Alfiky/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)