Expert Anthony Fauci (Photo: Reuters).
According to CNBC, expert Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House’s Covid-19 response steering committee, and Senator Rand Paul had a heated argument during a Senate hearing on July 20 regarding the controversial funding of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a study by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Paul accused Fauci of dishonesty during a congressional hearing in May when he denied that the NIH had funded “gain-of-function” research on the virus in a lab in Wuhan, where the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic is suspected to have leaked. During that hearing, Fauci acknowledged that he had transferred $600,000 to the EcoHealth Alliance, which then transferred the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study the risk of coronaviruses jumping from bats to humans. The research, he said, was necessary because the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s also originated in bats.
“Doctor, now that you know it’s a crime to lie to Congress, would you like to retract your statement? You said that the NIH never funded gain-of-function studies in Wuhan,” Sen. Paul said. Gain-of-function studies in viruses are controversial because they are aimed at understanding how viruses mutate and become more contagious or dangerous.
In response, Dr. Fauci said: “I did not lie to Congress. I have never lied, not to Congress. I do not retract that statement.” The top US epidemiologist affirmed that the study Mr. Paul mentioned did not include gain-of-function research.
The debate continued to heat up when Mr. Paul interrupted Mr. Fauci, causing him to angrily say: “Senator Paul, you don’t know what you’re talking about… If anyone is lying here, it’s you.”
Funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology has recently been controversial again as American politicians and scientists have unexpectedly rethought the theory about the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Wall Street Journal in March cited a US intelligence report saying that three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized with Covid-19-like symptoms in November 2019, shortly before China announced its first Covid-19 cases.
US and other countries suspect that the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic may have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory. US President Joe Biden in late May ordered intelligence agencies to redouble their efforts to provide clearer answers about the origins of the pandemic.
China has repeatedly denied that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. Earlier this year, China allowed an international team of experts led by the World Health Organization (WHO) to visit Wuhan to investigate. After the visit, Beijing rejected the WHO’s request to conduct a second phase of the investigation in China. Beijing has said it has fulfilled its obligations and now it is time to shift the investigation to other parts of the world, including labs in the United States.
