Dr. Anthony Fauci has continued to defend America’s $600,000 funding of research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He has insisted it is “vital” that the research be conducted there and said the grant proposal was to go and do a survey of what was going on among the bat population and what the original source of COVID-19 is.
Fauci shared with CNN anchor Jake Tapper that the Chinese government has not been a good-faith partner and they are not allowing transparency into a real investigation, but that the U.S has always been “careful” about their research. When Tapper asked if the U.S government should collaborate with Wuhan labs in the future, Fauci declined to say.
Fauci has tried to insist that the COVID-19 studies at the Wuhan lab were “very regulated” and “reviewed,” adding that there are progress reports published in the open literature. He said that the research was to try and figure out how to prevent something like this from happening ever again.
“If you go back to when this research really started and look at the scientific rationale for it, it was a peer-reviewed proposal that was peer-reviewed and given a very high rating for the importance of why it should be done to be able to go and do a survey of what was going on among the bat population because everyone in the world was trying to figure out what the original source of the original SARS CoV-1 was — and in that context, the research was done,” Fauci explained.
But he has constantly denied under oath that the National Institute of Health ever funded “gain-of-function research.” Sen. Rand Paul points to the grants going to the Wuhan Lab and said it fits the definition of gain-of-function research. Fauci tried to deny that taking an animal virus and increasing its transmissibility to humans was gain-of-function research, even though he defined it that way himself in a previous medical paper.
Fauci even told Tapper that it was critical the research was done in China since that’s where SARS first emerged. It said it wouldn’t contribute to the origin of the virus by “looking for bats” in Secaucus, New Jersey, or Fairfax County, Virginia. But the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the center of the virus leak theory and Fauci continues to deny that US money had anything to do with it.
But why has it taken so long for the US to come clean about funding in the country that even World Health Organization officials believe COVID-19 broke out in? Fauci first denied that there was funding at all and now said it was necessary. He continues to follow wherever the money is, and even as absurd as he sounds. There’s a reason so many lawmakers are calling for Fauci to get fired and put on trial.
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