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PolitiFact’s Katie Sanders asked Dr. Anthony Fauci if he was confident that COVID-19 developed naturally. Anthony Fauci indicated willingness to support investigations on a possible non-natural cause for this pandemic. Many among the conservatives believe that this was deliberately developed in a lab and released. PolitiFact appeared to want to put their name behind arguments that “this was not the case”.<\/p>\n
From Fox News:<\/span><\/p>\n Fauci did not explicitly rule out such a possibility: “I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China,” he said. “However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”<\/p>\n Paul had claimed that funding through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been funneled to controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology — the Chinese lab that is believed to have played a role in the initial outbreak of COVID-19. Paul specifically zeroed in on gain of function research — which works on making pathogens deadlier or more easily transmissible. He alleged that a U.S. virologist had been working with the Chinese institute on such research and said it was funded by the NIH.<\/p>\n Fauci said at the fact-checking event that Paul had been “conflating… in a way that’s almost irresponsible” collaborative research into Sars-Cov-1, which emerged in China in the early 2000s, with Chinese scientists.<\/p>\n Trump administration officials and Republicans on the Hill have long argued there is a high chance COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely” last week, but even Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO chief, has said the research team’s assessment on whether the virus entered the human population following a laboratory incident was not “extensive enough” and requires further investigation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Fox News has more on this event<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"