Fauci: What’s Incorrect from Accusers Is NIH Funding an Indirect Grant to Chinese Labs Working on Covid

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
Have been made against you by the Trump movement and by the kinds of members of Congress who are shouting at you the other day in that hearing. They have accused you of creating the Covid vaccine. They have accused you of covering up the real story that the virus was essentially deliberately or at least accidentally created. Could you respond to those claims?
>> They’re preposterous because we don’t know what the origin of this virus is. Either somehow came out of a lab where Chinese scientists went into the environment and got infected and played with it and came out, or it was a natural spillover from an animal to a human in the Wuhan market. I keep a completely open mind. The viral augical experts favor a natural occurrence. Since it isn’t definitive, I keep an open mind. What they say that is incorrect is the NIH funted a grant in China, an indirect grant from a firm in New York that did a subaward to do some surveillance studies on what is out there, which is a perfectly appropriate thing to do, in fact, I would probably be held as being incompetent if I didn’t, if we didn’t do that, as it turns out, the viruses that were being studied under the NIH grant are evolutionarily so distant from sars-cov-2 that there’s no chance in the world somebody could turn it into sars-cov-2. So this attack is preposterous and anybody who knows anything about virology will say it’s so distant that the precursor virus could not possibly turn in even if you tried.
>> You mean looking at it moleculare, this virus understudy, with in terms of NIH having any involvement, is so dissimilar to the virus that caused the pandemic that there’s no chance.
>> Even if you tried. Even if you tried to do it. But that still doesn’t rule out the possibility that somewhere in China, out of a lab came the virus. That’s why I always say over and over again, even though the evidence strongly weighs towards it being a natural occurrence, I keep an open mind that we still don’t know what the origin is.
>> I have so much more to ask you. Can you stay?