The GOP is determined to push the theory that SARS2, the virus that has wreaked havoc on the globe for the past year, escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.
But over the last week, there has been increasing finger pointing directly at Dr. Anthony Fauci as they imply complicit involvement in the escape of the virus by approving of funding for “gain-of-function” research — i.e., altering genomes to give viruses new properties, such as the ability to infect a new host species or to transmit more easily.
The idea behind such research is that it might provide insight into how a virus spreads and improve efforts to counteract it, though it also carries obvious risks, which is why funding for such research is limited.
Fauci has said that the NIH has never funded such research, but also admitted that he didn’t know everything that the country did with the money.
Fauci went head-to-head with Senator Rand Paul yesterday, suggesting Fauci was covering up for U.S. involvement.
Before Fauci’s Tuesday testimony, Tucker Carlson led off his show Monday night by stating that the coronavirus did escape from a Wuhan lab, as if it were proven fact — which it is not.
Tucker explained “the deadly experiments that were going on there” — which is valid, given that’s the kind of thing virologists do — “clearly went so wrong.”
It has been known for a long time that U.S. health agencies funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and it’s valid to ask whether that funding was a good idea. But there is no evidence that such funding ran afoul of U.S. law or that it contributed to the pandemic.