Fauci responds to allegations on COVID lab leak theory funding

Yesterday, at a meeting in Congress, the former NIAID director tried to avoid responsibility for claims that his agency funded research that led to the pandemic. Documents found by investigators and journalists show that NIAID funded research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Lab through a grant to EcoHealth Alliance. Fauci said the research met a general definition of gain-of-function but not the specific one for dangerous research. He also mentioned that it was unlikely for the viruses manipulated in the research to have caused the pandemic. EcoHealth's work in Wuhan may have met the criteria for gain-of-function research according to the P3CO framework. Fauci's claim that EcoHealth's research didn't meet the framework's definition is irrelevant for the first three years of the grant. NIAID asked EcoHealth to stop experiments that might violate the pause on gain-of-function research. Fauci's testimony may have been misleading because EcoHealth's work could have met the P3CO definition. Fauci testified about allegations that he downplayed the lab leak theory. He denied any involvement in downplaying the theory. Fauci previously dismissed the idea that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, citing the virus's evolution in bats as evidence against manipulation. He also called the lab leak theory a remote possibility in a podcast. Reports surfaced about researchers at the Wuhan lab being hospitalized with coronavirus-like symptoms in 2019, raising questions about the virus's origin.