Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is demanding Dr. Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “come clean” about providing funding for a Wuhan lab to perform “gain of function research.”
“I hope Tony Fauci gives some straight answers today for once,” Cotton said during an appearance on Fox News ahead of Fauci’s testimony before a Senate committee.
He added, “It’s a matter of public record that the NIH spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in these Wuhan labs and these Wuhan labs were doing gain of function research to make coronaviruses more contagious and more dangerous. They need to come clean with the American people, they need to stop playing word games. They need to explain why they funded that research apparently in violation of at least the spirit, if not the letter, of an Obama White House directive.”
Host Dana Perino noted Fauci has previously said gain of function research was not something the lab was authorized to do.
She asked Cotton, “Does that matter?”
Watch Cotton’s interview below:
Cotton replied, “Well if that’s the case, they need to answer why the oversight of their grants is so sloppy. Again, they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars indirectly to these Wuhan labs.”
The funding Cotton seems to be referring to is a $600,000 grant from NIAID that was provided to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, the group then paid the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study the risk of humans becoming infected by bat coronaviruses, as Fox News reports.
“We had a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus, and we did that through a sub-grant from a larger grant to EcoHealth,” Fauci said on Wednesday during his testimony.
During a heated exchange with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) earlier this month, Fauci stressed “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan institute.”