White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul got into a heated exchange at a Senate hearing Tuesday over whether the National Institutes of Health funded controversial research the GOP senator claims could have contributed to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paul questioned Fauci about an NIH-funded study that he claims qualifies as gain-of-function research, the process of altering a pathogen in a lab to make it more transmissible in order to better predict emerging diseases.
Paul asked Fauci if he would like to retract his denial in previous Senate testimony that the NIH has directly funded the research at a lab in Wuhan, China that has come under intense scrutiny as a possible source of the virus. “Fauci, as you are