WASHINGTON, D.C. – Tensions over the coronavirus rise in Washington D.C. even as, nationally, cases drop to all-time lows.
Senate Republicans wasted no time grilling Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci at a hearing Tuesday, even insinuating he had something to do with the controversial theory that the coronavirus escaped a lab in China.
Fauci pushed back against Sen. Rand Paul’s so-called “conspiracy theory” that the National Institutes of Health funded virus research at a lab in Wuhan.
“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done,” Fauci said. “However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“You’re allowing super viruses to be created with a 15% mortality. It’s very dangerous, and it was a huge mistake to share this with China. And it’s a huge mistake to allow this to continue in the United States,” Paul said.
Fauci, though, said only one thing should continue in the country, the only thing he thinks will end the pandemic.
“We are in a race between the vaccine and the virus. If left to its own devices it will continue to surge,” Fauci said.
